School of Biological Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane Qld 4072, Australia.
Parasit Vectors. 2011 Feb 28;4:28. doi: 10.1186/1756-3305-4-28.
Wolbachia is an intracellular bacterium that has been stably transinfected into the mosquito vector of dengue, Aedes aegypti. This inherited infection causes a range of metabolic and phenotypic alterations in the mosquito, which might be related to neuronal abnormalities. In order to determine if these alterations were caused by the manipulation of neuroamines by this bacterium, we studied the expression of genes involved in the dopamine biosynthetic pathway and also measured the amount of dopamine in infected and uninfected mosquitoes of different ages. Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes exhibit greater expression of some genes related to the melanization pathway, but not for those directly linked to dopamine production. Although dopamine levels were higher in Wolbachia-positive mosquitoes this was not consistent across all insect ages nor was it related to the previously described Wolbachia induced "bendy" and "shaky" phenotypes.
沃尔巴克氏体是一种存在于细胞内的细菌，已被稳定地转染到登革热的蚊子传播媒介埃及伊蚊中。这种遗传性感染导致蚊子发生一系列代谢和表型改变，这可能与神经元异常有关。为了确定这些改变是否是由这种细菌对神经胺的操纵引起的，我们研究了参与多巴胺生物合成途径的基因的表达情况，同时还测量了不同年龄的感染和未感染蚊子中的多巴胺含量。感染沃尔巴克氏体的蚊子表现出一些与黑化途径相关的基因表达增强，但与多巴胺产生直接相关的基因则不然。尽管沃尔巴克氏体阳性蚊子中的多巴胺水平较高，但这在所有昆虫年龄阶段并不一致，也与之前描述的沃尔巴克氏体诱导的“弯曲”和“摇晃”表型无关。
