Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA.
Nat Microbiol. 2021 Dec;6(12):1575-1582. doi: 10.1038/s41564-021-00998-6. Epub 2021 Nov 24.
Wolbachia, a maternally inherited intracellular bacterial species, can manipulate host insect reproduction by cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI), which results in embryo lethality in crosses between infected males and uninfected females. CI is encoded by two prophage genes, cifA and cifB. Wolbachia, coupled with the sterile insect technique, has been used in field trials to control populations of the dengue vector Aedes albopictus, but CI-inducing strains are not known to infect the malaria vector Anopheles gambiae. Here we show that cifA and cifB can induce conditional sterility in the malaria vector An. gambiae. We used transgenic expression of these Wolbachia-derived genes in the An. gambiae germline to show that cifB is sufficient to cause embryonic lethality and that cifB-induced sterility is rescued by cifA expression in females. When we co-expressed cifA and cifB in male mosquitoes, the CI phenotype was attenuated. In female mosquitoes, cifB impaired fertility, which was overcome by co-expression of cifA. Our findings pave the way towards using CI to control malaria mosquito vectors.
沃尔巴克氏体是一种母系遗传的细胞内细菌物种，可通过细胞质不亲和（CI）来操纵宿主昆虫的繁殖，从而导致感染雄性与未感染雌性之间的杂交胚胎致死。CI 由两个前噬菌体基因 cifA 和 cifB 编码。沃尔巴克氏体与不育昆虫技术相结合，已在田间试验中用于控制登革热媒介埃及伊蚊的种群，但已知 CI 诱导株不会感染疟疾媒介冈比亚按蚊。在这里，我们表明 cifA 和 cifB 可以在疟疾媒介冈比亚按蚊中诱导条件性不育。我们使用这些沃尔巴克氏体衍生基因在冈比亚按蚊生殖系中的转基因表达表明 cifB 足以引起胚胎致死，并且 cifA 在雌性中的表达可挽救 cifB 诱导的不育。当我们在雄蚊中共同表达 cifA 和 cifB 时，CI 表型减弱。在雌蚊中，cifB 损害了生育能力，而 cifA 的共表达克服了 cifB 的作用。我们的研究结果为利用 CI 来控制疟疾蚊子媒介铺平了道路。
