A field survey for Wolbchia and phage WO infections of Aedes albopictus in Guangzhou City, China

Abstract

Wolbachia are maternal endosymbiotic bacterium, which infect a diverse range of arthropods, ranging from 20 to 76% in nature. They are capable of inducing a wide range of reproductive abnormalities to their hosts, such as cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI), which has been proposed to be used as a tool to modify mosquitoes that are resistant to the development of pathogen, as an alternative vector control strategy. Here, we evaluated the prevalence of Wolbachia and phage WO infections in the field population of Aedes albopictus in Guangzhou City via polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assay using the Wolbachia specific Wolbachia surface protein (wsp) and phage WO orf7 gene primers. Based on the results of PCR and phylogeny analysis, we found that A. albopictus in Guangzhou City were infected with two Wolbachia strains, wAlbA and wAlbB. Phage WO, the virus-infected Wolbachia, was also detected in A. albopictus. One hundred and ten female individuals were screened via PCR, with 109 super-infected with Wolbachia and one sample single-infected with wAlbB strain. And 104 of 113 male individuals were both infected with wAlbA and wAlbB, and nine male samples were found to be infected with wAlbA strain only. The infection rates of phage WO in female and male individuals were 82.73 and 46.02%, respectively. These results showed that the natural Wolbachia and phage WO infections in A. albopictus population in Guangzhou were at a higher frequency at present, indicating that Wolbachia appear to be a better candidate nature resource for biological control insect vectors to reduce vector-borne diseases.

Identification and molecular characterization of Wolbachia strains in natural populations of Aedes albopictus in China

“…Our results showed a prevalence of 93.36% for Wolbachia in natural populations of Ae. albopictus in China, slightly lower than the 100% previously reported in Guangzhou (China), Orissa (India), Chachoengsao (Thailand) [18,33,35] and over 99% in Korea [34]. Furthermore, single infections with both wAlbA and wAlbB were detected in our study and the prevalence of wAlbB (10.10%) strains was higher than that of wAlbA strains (2.31%).…”

“…In a given region Ae. albopictus harbors only single wAlbA infections, and field-collected mosquitoes with single wAlbB infections were identified in Changsha, Chenzhou and Wuhan, as has been previously reported in Guangzhou [18]. Studies of natural Wolbachia infections of Ae.…”

Genome-Wide SNPs Reveal the Drivers of Gene Flow In An Urban Population of the Asian Tiger Mosquito,Aedes albopictus

“…aegypti [9]. Aedes albopictus females in Guangzhou are normally superinfected with two Wolbachia strains, wAlbA and wAlbB [12], and Wolbachia-based population suppression has been conducted by releasing males that carry an additional strain, wPip, that has been transferred from Culex pipiens (Diptera: Culicidae) [13]. This population suppression effort has been successful, with population reductions of more than 90% maintained over two years (Xi pers.…”

Pyrethroids in indoor air during application of various mosquito repellents: Occurrence, dissipation and potential exposure risk

“…time in indoor environments, where they are potentially exposed to a variety of xenobiotics, e.g., insecticides (Hadnagy et al, 2003;Zhang et al, 2013). The increased use of insecticides in homes for pest control has drawn extra attention to the risk of indoor exposure to these substances (Davis and Ahmed, 1998;Yusà et al, 2014;Zhang et al, 2014). Specifically, spraying of insecticides at high levels has been recommended as an emergency vector-control practice during outbreaks of mosquito-borne illnesses, e.g.…”