Wolbachia pipientis grows in Saccharomyces cerevisiae evoking early death of the host and deregulation of mitochondrial metabolism

Abstract

Wolbachia sp. has colonized over 70% of insect species, successfully manipulating host fertility, protein expression, lifespan, and metabolism. Understanding and engineering the biochemistry and physiology of Wolbachia holds great promise for insect vector-borne disease eradication. Wolbachia is cultured in cell lines, which have long duplication times and are difficult to manipulate and study. The yeast strain Saccharomyces cerevisiae W303 was used successfully as an artificial host for Wolbachia wAlbB. As compared to controls, infected yeast lost viability early, probably as a result of an abnormally high mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation activity observed at late stages of growth. No respiratory chain proteins from Wolbachia were detected, while several Wolbachia F F -ATPase subunits were revealed. After 5 days outside the cell, Wolbachia remained fully infective against insect cells.

Discovery of Early-Branching Wolbachia Reveals Functional Enrichment on Horizontally Transferred Genes

“…As might be expected, we found universally high purifying selection on housekeeping activities such as ribonucleotide binding, DNA topoisomerase type II, and DNA topological change, but early-branching Wolbachia also showed enhanced purifying selection for energy and respiration-related activities including ATP binding, NADH dehydrogenase activity, quinone binding, and respirasome activity. These conserved respiration functions may relate to host mitochondria- Wolbachia interaction homeostasis, which has been shown as critical to maintenance in host cells – and disruption of oxidative phosphorylation leading to host cell death in alternate hosts ( Uribe-Alvarez et al, 2019 ). Among w Tex and w Ppe, there appeared to be the highest purifying selection on metabolic functions associated with energy, and metal ion, iron-sulfur cluster, heme binding, which again point to oxygenic-mitochondrial and heme synthesis processes and mitochondria- Wolbachia interaction and homeostasis as key functions specifically conserved in PPN Wolbachia .…”

Inhibitory to non-inhibitory evolution of the ζ subunit of the F1FO-ATPase of Paracoccus denitrificans and α-proteobacteria as related to mitochondrial endosymbiosis

“…Therefore, in order to prevent the possibility of the αPATPsζ gene being present but skipped or missed in our bioinformatics search in Rickettsiales, we confirmed biochemically that the ζ subunit is totally absent in one species of these Rickettsiales. We isolated the F 1 -ATPase from Wolbachia pipientis (WpF 1 ), grown as an intracellular symbiotic host in human erythrocytes; since the latter lack mitochondria, this ensured the absence of putative contaminant mitochondrial F-ATPase (mtF-ATPase) present, for instance, in yeast that was used before as the W. pipientis host ( Uribe-Alvarez et al, 2019 ). As expected, from the absence of the αPATPsζ gene in W. pipientis , we found by WpF 1 purification and anti-ζ Western blot that Wp-ζ is totally absent in the WpF 1 -ATPase ( Figure 10C ), where we confirmed the presence of the α, β, γ, and ε subunits ( Figures 10A, B ).…”

Physiological costs of facultative endosymbionts in aphids assessed from energy metabolism

“…Similar effects likely arise in Drosophila as well, since different strains of Wolbachia either increase or decrease the flies' locomotor activity (Hague et al, 2021), which necessarily implies variations in their metabolic rate. There are few studies suggesting that Wolbachia could interact with its host's aerobic metabolism, either by supplementing or hijacking it (Darby et al, 2012; Uribe‐Alvarez et al, 2019). Such sub‐cellular effects of facultative endosymbionts need to be investigated in other symbiotic associations, such as H. defensa and R. insecticola with aphids.…”