School of Biological Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, 4072, Australia.
Department of Plant Medicine, College of Agriculture, National Chiayi University, Chiayi City, 60004, Taiwan.
Environ Microbiol. 2022 Mar;24(3):1326-1339. doi: 10.1111/1462-2920.15833. Epub 2021 Nov 18.
Wolbachia is one of the most successful endosymbiotic bacteria of arthropods. Known as the 'master of manipulation', Wolbachia can induce a wide range of phenotypes in its host that can have far-reaching ecological and evolutionary consequences and may be exploited for disease and pest control. However, our knowledge of Wolbachia's distribution and the infection rate is unevenly distributed across arthropod groups such as scale insects. We fitted a distribution of within-species prevalence of Wolbachia to our data and compared it to distributions fitted to an up-to-date dataset compiled from surveys across all arthropods. The estimated distribution parameters indicate a Wolbachia infection frequency of 43.6% (at a 10% prevalence threshold) in scale insects. Prevalence of Wolbachia in scale insects follows a distribution similar to exponential decline (most species are predicted to have low prevalence infections), in contrast to the U-shaped distribution estimated for other taxa (most species have a very low or very high prevalence). We observed no significant associations between Wolbachia infection and scale insect traits. Finally, we screened for Wolbachia in scale insect's ecological associates. We found a positive correlation between Wolbachia infection in scale insects and their ant associates, pointing to a possible route of horizontal transfer of Wolbachia.
沃尔巴克氏体是节肢动物中最成功的共生菌之一。被称为“操纵大师”，沃尔巴克氏体可以在其宿主中诱导广泛的表型，这些表型可能产生深远的生态和进化后果，并可能被用于疾病和害虫控制。然而，我们对沃尔巴克氏体在节肢动物中的分布和感染率的了解在诸如介壳虫等昆虫类群中分布不均。我们将沃尔巴克氏体在种内的流行率分布拟合到我们的数据中，并将其与从所有节肢动物调查中汇编的最新数据集拟合的分布进行了比较。估计的分布参数表明，介壳虫中的沃尔巴克氏体感染频率为 43.6%（在 10%的流行率阈值下）。与其他类群估计的 U 形分布（大多数物种的感染率都非常低或非常高）相反，介壳虫中沃尔巴克氏体的流行率遵循指数衰减的分布（大多数物种都预测为低流行率感染）。我们没有观察到沃尔巴克氏体感染与介壳虫特征之间存在显著的关联。最后，我们筛选了介壳虫的生态相关物种中是否存在沃尔巴克氏体。我们发现介壳虫中的沃尔巴克氏体感染与它们的蚂蚁伴生物之间存在正相关，这表明沃尔巴克氏体可能存在水平转移的途径。
