Wolbachia pipientis is an intracellular alphaproteobacterium that infects 40%–60% of insect species and is well known for host reproductive manipulations. Although
Wolbachia are primarily maternally transmitted, evidence of horizontal transmission can be found in incongruent host–symbiont phylogenies and recent acquisitions of the same
Wolbachia strain by distantly related species. Parasitoids and predator–prey interactions may indeed facilitate the transfer of
Wolbachia between insect lineages, but it is likely that
Wolbachia are acquired via introgression in many cases. Many hypotheses exist to explain
Wolbachia prevalence and penetrance, such as nutritional supplementation, protection from parasites, protection from viruses, or direct reproductive parasitism. Using classical genetics, we show that
Wolbachia increase recombination in infected lineages across two genomic intervals. This increase in recombination is titer-dependent as the
wMelPop variant, which infects at higher load in
Drosophila melanogaster, increases recombination 5% more than the
wMel variant. In addition, we also show that
Spiroplasma poulsonii, another bacterial intracellular symbiont of
D. melanogaster, does not induce an increase in recombination. Our results suggest that
Wolbachia infection specifically alters its host’s recombination landscape in a dose-dependent manner.
View Full-Text
►▼
Show Figures
This is an open access article distributed under the
Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited