Journal article
Fine-scale landscape genomics helps explain the slow spatial spread of Wolbachia through the Aedes aegypti population in Cairns, Australia
TL Schmidt, I Filipović, AA Hoffmann, G Rašić
Heredity | SPRINGERNATURE | Published : 2018
Abstract
The endosymbiotic bacterium Wolbachia suppresses the capacity for arbovirus transmission in the mosquito Aedes aegypti, and can spread spatially through wild mosquito populations following local introductions. Recent introductions in Cairns, Australia have demonstrated slower than expected spatial spread. Potential reasons for this include: (i) barriers to Ae. aegypti dispersal; (ii) higher incidence of long-range dispersal; and (iii) intergenerational loss of Wolbachia. We investigated these three potential factors using genome-wide single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and an assay for the Wolbachia infection wMel in 161 Ae. aegypti collected from Cairns in 2015. We detected a small but s..
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Funding Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Eliminate Dengue Cairns, particularly field officer Angela Caird, for assistance with ovitrap deployment. We thank the Cairns householders participating in the study for granting permission to deploy ovitraps on their property, as well as Scott Ritchie and Christopher Paton from the Centre for Biosecurity in Tropical Infectious Diseases, James Cook University, for assisting with the processing of field collections. The National Health and Medical Research Council provided funding for this research through a Programme grant and Fellowship grant to A.A. Hoffmann.