Mediating Arboviruses using Wolbachia Bacteria

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Section 1

Wolbachia bacteria were discovered in 1924 when a scientist found the bacteria in Culex pipiens, a mosquito species (Teixeira L, Ferreira Á, Ashburner M., 2008). Studies focusing on Wolbachia became more popular in the 1970s when scientists from UCLA discovered the bacteria’s ability to carry out cytoplasmic incompatibility by looking at mortality in mosquito populations.

It is estimated that Wolbachia infects around 20% of all insect species. Wolbachia is a monophyletic clade of alpha-proteobacteria that infects a wide array of invertebrates. Wolbachia is an intracellular bacteria, meaning that it replicates in the cytoplasm of its host (Serbus L. et al 2008). Wolbachia lack many of the genes associated with membrane biogenesis meaning they lack the ability to synthesize lipid A, which is a typical feature of proteobacteria membranes (Foster, J., 2005). Wolbachia is a non-mobile, rod-like, gram-negative bacteria, with a circular chromosome. Wolbachia is closely related to the genus Francisella as well as being closely related to Ehrlichia, Anaplasma and Rickettsia, all disease-causing bacteria. However, Wolbachia, unlike its close bacteria relatives, does not infect vertebrates (Werren Lab Wolbachia Biology). Wolbachia can not be cultured in isolation (Scholz, M et al. 2020). This means that it is particularly difficult to sequence Wolbachia alone, and it is often co-sequenced with the host organism. This can lead to contamination of the Wolbachia genome with the host genome. Mavingui, P et al. (2012) sequenced the Wolbachia wAlbB genome. The study found that the genome has around 1,239,814 bp, with about a 33.7% GC content. There are roughly 1,209 protein-coding sequences each with an average length of 849 bp. Wolbachia has 2 rRNA operons, one of them is used in Wolbachia’s most famous ability, cytoplasmic incompatibility. The study also showed that there are a significant amount of protein families that are present only in the wAlbB strain, suggesting that there are potentially specific genes for specific interactions with other microorganisms and hosts (Mavingui, P. et al. 2012).

Currently, three strains of Wolbachia have been sequenced. As stated earlier, Wolbachia can not be made into isolated cultures and thus sequenced independently from their host. Therefore, each strain represents Wolbachia infections in different host species. The host species include, Drosophila melanogaster, a common fruit fly, Culex quinquefasciatus, a mosquito, and Brugia malayi, a nematode. The first strain, which infects the common fruit fly, appears to exclusively use cytoplasmic incompatibility. Comparisons of these strains have suggested that recombination and horizontal gene transfer occurs in all of the Wolbachia strains (Klasson et al. 2009). Moreover, a recent study calculated that about three-fourths of the genes that were looked at in the experiment were affected by recombination (Klasson et al. 2009).

Section 2

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Section 3

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References

Authored for BIOL 238 Microbiology, taught by Joan Slonczewski, 2022, Kenyon College