School of Biology, University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom.
School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom.
PeerJ. 2024 Jul 26;12:e17781. doi: 10.7717/peerj.17781. eCollection 2024.
The fitness effects of overt parasites, and host resistance to them, are well documented. Most symbionts, however, are more covert and their interactions with their hosts are less well understood. , an intracellular symbiont of insects, is particularly interesting because it is thought to be unaffected by the host immune response and to have fitness effects mostly focussed on sex ratio manipulation. Here, we use quantitative PCR to investigate whether host genotype affects infection density in the leaf-cutting ant , and whether infection density may affect host morphology or caste determination. We found significant differences between host colonies in the density of infections, and also smaller intracolonial differences in infection density between host patrilines. However, the density of infections did not appear to affect the morphology of adult queens or likelihood of ants developing as queens. The results suggest that both host genotype and environment influence the host- relationship, but that infections carry little or no physiological effect on the development of larvae in this system.
外寄生物的适合度效应及其宿主的抗性已得到充分证实。然而，大多数共生体更为隐蔽，其与宿主的相互作用还不太了解。细菌 Wolbachia 是昆虫的一种内共生体，它特别有趣，因为它被认为不受宿主免疫反应的影响，其适合度效应主要集中在性别比例操纵上。在这里，我们使用定量 PCR 来研究宿主基因型是否会影响切叶蚁中 Wolbachia 的感染密度，以及感染密度是否会影响宿主形态或等级决定。我们发现，宿主群体之间的感染密度存在显著差异，而且宿主谱系之间的感染密度在群体内的差异也较小。然而，Wolbachia 的感染密度似乎并不影响成年蚁后的形态或蚂蚁发育为蚁后的可能性。结果表明，宿主基因型和环境都影响着宿主-共生体关系，但在这个系统中，Wolbachia 感染对幼虫的发育几乎没有或没有生理影响。
