Using Wolbachia to control rice planthopper populations: progress and challenges

Guo, Yan; Shao, Jiayi; Wu, Yanxian; Li, Yifeng

doi:10.3389/fmicb.2023.1244239

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 113 publications

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“…An alternative strategy for controlling the fly population is biological control. Recently, significant progress in our understanding of Wolbachia population ecology and genetics has reinforced the idea of using Wolbachia as a new method in the biological control of medically, veterinary, and agriculturally important arthropods [11][12][13][14]. Induction of cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI) by this endosymbiont is the most popular mode of reproductive alteration, in which females that are either uninfected or infected with a different strain of Wolbachia fail to develop viable eggs when cross with Wolbachia-infected males [15,16].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A survey of Wolbachia infection in brachyceran flies from Iran

Khosravi,

Akbarzadeh,

Karimian

et al. 2024

PLoS ONE

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Wolbachia is a maternally inherited intracellular bacterium that is considered to be the most plentiful endosymbiont found in arthropods. It reproductively manipulates its host to increase the chances of being transmitted to the insect progeny; and it is currently used as a means of suppressing disease vector populations or controlling vector-borne diseases. Studies of the dissemination and prevalence of Wolbachia among its arthropod hosts are important for its possible use as a biological control agent. The molecular identification of Wolbachia relies on different primers sets due to Wolbachia strain variation. Here, we screened for the presence of Wolbachia in a broad range of Brachycera fly species (Diptera), collected from different regions of Iran, using nine genetic markers (wsp, ftsZ, fbpA, gatB, CoxA, gltA, GroEL dnaA, and 16s rRNA), for detecting, assessing the sensitivity of primers for detection, and phylogeny of this bacterium. The overall incidence of Wolbachia among 22 species from six families was 27.3%. The most commonly positive fly species were Pollenia sp. and Hydrotaea armipes. However, the bacterium was not found in the most medically important flies or in potential human disease vectors, including Musca domestica, Sarcophaga spp., Calliphora vicinia, Lucilia sericata, and Chrysomya albiceps. The primer sets of 16s rRNA with 53.0% and gatB with 52.0% were the most sensitive primers for detecting Wolbachia. Blast search, phylogenetic, and MLST analysis of the different locus sequences of Wolbachia show that all the six distantly related fly species likely belonging to supergroup A. Our study showed some primer sets generated false negatives in many of the samples, emphasizing the importance of using different loci in detecting Wolbachia. The study provides the groundwork for future studies of a Wolbachia-based program for control of flies.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A survey of Wolbachia infection in brachyceran flies from Iran

Khosravi,

Akbarzadeh,

Karimian

et al. 2024

PLoS ONE

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Restoring data balance via generative models of T-cell receptors for antigen-binding prediction

Loffredo,

Pastore,

Cocco

et al. 2024

Preprint

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Unveiling the specificity in T-cell-receptor and antigen recognition represents a major step to understand the immune system response. Many supervised machine learning approaches have been designed to build sequence-based predictive models of such specificity using binding and non-binding examples of data. Due to the presence of few specific and many non-specific T-cell receptors for each antigen, available datasets are heavily imbalanced and make the goal of achieving solid predictive performances very challenging. Here, we propose to restore data balance through data augmentation using generative unsupervised models. We then use these augmented data to train supervised models for prediction of peptide-specific T-cell receptors and binding pairs of peptide and T-cell receptors sequences. We show that our pipeline yields increased performance in terms of T-cell receptors specificity prediction tasks. More broadly, our work provides a general framework to restore balance in computational problems involving biological sequence data.Significance StatementThe adaptive immune system carries a diverse set of T-cell receptors capable of recognizing pathogens and protect the host from diseases. Predicting whether a receptor binds a pathogenic peptide is a fundamental computational problem, made difficult by the imbalance in available data: relatively few binding pairs are known compared to all possible pairs of receptors and peptides. Here, we propose to mitigate this imbalance problem by generating putative binding pairs through data augmentation machine-learning methods. We show that these extra data helps training binding prediction models and improves their performances. Our framework for sequence data augmentation is generic and could be applied to other biological computational problems.

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The bacterial microbiome in Spider and Deathwatch beetles

Hendricks,

Philips,

Engl

et al. 2024

Preprint

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The beetle family Ptinidae contains a number of economically important pests, such as the Cigarette beetleLasioderma serricorne, the Drugstore beetleStegobium paniceum, and the diverse Spider beetles. Many of these species are stored product pests which target a diverse range of food sources from dried tobacco to books made with organic materials. Despite the threat that the 2,200 species of Ptinidae beetles pose, fewer than 50 have been surveyed for microbial symbionts, and only a handful have been screened using contemporary genomic methods. In this study, we screen 116 individual specimens that cover most subfamilies of Ptinidae, with outgroup beetles from closely related families Dermestidae, Endecatomidae, and Bostrichidae. We used 16S ribosomal RNA gene amplicon data to characterize the bacterial microbiomes of these specimens. The majority of these species had never been screened for microbes. We found that, unlike in their sister family Bostrichidae that has two mutualistic bacteria seen in most species, there are no consistent bacterial members of ptinid microbiomes. For specimens which hadWolbachiainfections, we did additional screening using multilocus sequence typing, and showed that our populations have different strains ofWolbachiathan has been noted in previous publications.ImportancePtinid beetles are both household pests of pantry goods and economic pests of dried good warehouses and cultural archives such as libraries and museums. Currently, the most common pest control measures for ptinid beetles are phosphine and/or heat treatments. Many ptinid beetles have been observed to have increasing resistance to phosphine, and heat treatments are not appropriate for many of the goods commonly infested by ptinids. Pest control techniques focused on symbiotic bacteria have been shown to significantly decrease populations, and often have the beneficial side effect of being more specific than other pest control techniques. This survey provides foundational information about the bacteria associated with diverse ptinid species, which may be used for future control efforts.

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Using Wolbachia to control rice planthopper populations: progress and challenges

Cited by 4 publications

References 113 publications

A survey of Wolbachia infection in brachyceran flies from Iran

A survey of Wolbachia infection in brachyceran flies from Iran

Restoring data balance via generative models of T-cell receptors for antigen-binding prediction

The bacterial microbiome in Spider and Deathwatch beetles

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