Journal article
A wMel Wolbachia variant in Aedes aegypti from field-collected Drosophila melanogaster with increased phenotypic stability under heat stress
X Gu, PA Ross, J Rodriguez-Andres, KL Robinson, Q Yang, MJ Lau, AA Hoffmann
Environmental Microbiology | WILEY | Published : 2022
Abstract
Mosquito-borne diseases remain a major cause of morbidity and mortality. Population replacement strategies involving the wMel strain of Wolbachia are being used widely to control mosquito-borne diseases. However, these strategies may be influenced by temperature because wMel is vulnerable to heat. wMel infections in Drosophila melanogaster are genetically diverse, but few transinfections of wMel variants have been generated in Aedes aegypti. Here, we successfully transferred a wMel variant (termed wMelM) originating from a field-collected D. melanogaster into Ae. aegypti. The new wMelM variant (clade I) is genetically distinct from the original wMel transinfection (clade III), and there are ..
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Grants
Awarded by National Health and Medical Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
The authors thank Kelly Richardson for collecting the Drosophila line used for microinjection, Marianne Coquilleau for the assistance in the experiments and Moshe Jasper for support with LAMP assays. A.A.H. was supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council (1132412, 1118640, ). P.A.R. was supported by a University of Melbourne Early Career Research Grant. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Open access publishing facilitated by The University of Melbourne, as part of the Wiley - The University of Melbourne agreement via the Council of Australian University Librarians.