Journal article
Mitochondrial DNA variants help monitor the dynamics of Wolbachia invasion into host populations
HL Yeap, G Rašić, NM Endersby-Harshman, SF Lee, E Arguni, H Le Nguyen, AA Hoffmann
Heredity | Published : 2016
DOI: 10.1038/hdy.2015.97
Abstract
Wolbachia is the most widespread endosymbiotic bacterium of insects and other arthropods that can rapidly invade host populations. Deliberate releases of Wolbachia into natural populations of the dengue fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti, are used as a novel biocontrol strategy for dengue suppression. Invasion of Wolbachia through the host population relies on factors such as high fidelity of the endosymbiont transmission and limited immigration of uninfected individuals, but these factors can be difficult to measure. One way of acquiring relevant information is to consider mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) variation alongside Wolbachia in field-caught mosquitoes. Here we used diagnostic mtDNA markers to..
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Funding Acknowledgements
This work is funded by the program grants from the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health through the Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Tahija Foundation. The work is also supported by a fellowship from the Australian Research Council Australia to AAH and an Alfred-Nicholas Fellowship to HLY. Nectar Research Cloud and VIC Node (University of Melbourne) provided the bioinformatics resources. We are grateful to a number of researchers for providing field collections of A. aegypti, including Rafael Maciel-de-Freitas and Renato Maspero (Fiocruz, Brazil) and Brian Montgomery (Monash University). Additional thanks to Rosanna Powell, Anjali Goundar, Jason K. Axford, Katrina Billington and Inaki Iturbe-Ormaetxe for laboratory samples and/or sample processing, Igor Filipovic for the bioinformatics support and Lucien Sankey for help with the figure design.