Project description:Wolbachia is the most widespread endosymbiotic bacterium that manipulates reproduction of its arthropod hosts to enhance its own spread throughout host populations. Infection with Wolbachia causes complete parthenogenetic reproduction in many Hymenoptera, producing only female offspring. The mechanism of such reproductive manipulation by Wolbachia has been extensively studied. However, the effects of Wolbachia symbiosis on behavioral traits of the hosts are scarcely investigated. The parasitoid wasp Asobara japonica is an ideal insect to investigate this because symbiotic and aposymbiotic strains are available: Wolbachia-infected Tokyo (TK) and noninfected Iriomote (IR) strains originally collected on the main island and southwest islands of Japan, respectively. We compared the oviposition behaviors of the two strains and found that TK strain females parasitized Drosophila melanogaster larvae more actively than the IR strain, especially during the first two days after eclosion. Removing Wolbachia from the TK strain wasps by treatment with tetracycline or rifampicin decreased their parasitism activity to the level of the IR strain. Morphological and behavioral analyses of both strain wasps showed that Wolbachia endosymbionts do not affect development of the host female reproductive tract and eggs, but do enhance host-searching ability of female wasps. These results suggest the possibility that Wolbachia endosymbionts may promote their diffusion and persistence in the host A. japonica population not only at least partly by parthenogenesis but also by enhancement of oviposition frequency of the host females.
Project description:The oxidative homeostasis is the balance between reactive oxygen species and antioxidant molecules. In addition to be considered as a key factor underlying life-history traits evolution, the oxidative homeostasis has been shown to be involved in many host-symbiont associations. Previous studies suggest an interaction between the bacterial endosymbiont Wolbachia and the oxidative homeostasis of some insect hosts. This interaction is likely to exert a strong influence on the host evolution, as it has been proposed in the wasp Asobara tabida, whose dependence upon Wolbachia is due to the evolutionary loss of its ability to regulate the oxidative homeostasis in the absence of the symbiont. Although such cases of complete dependence are rare, cases of insects having lost only a part of their autonomy over the control of the oxidative homeostasis might be more common. If so, one can expect that insects having coevolved with Wolbachia will be more sensitive to oxidative stress when cured of their symbionts. We tested this hypothesis by studying the effects of an experimentally-induced oxidative stress on various life-history traits of Asobara japonica, a species closely related to A. tabida. For most of the life-history traits studied, the sensitivity of the wasps to oxidative stress did not correlate with their infection status. The only exception was the parasitic success. However, contrarily to our expectation, the sensitivity to oxidative stress was increased, rather than decreased, when Wolbachia was present. This result suggests that Wolbachia does not participate to mitigate oxidative stress in A. japonica, and that on the contrary its presence might still be costly in stressful environments.
Project description:To determine the distribution of centromere units in the genome of holocentric Chionographis japonica, we performed CENH3-ChIPseq using the customized species-specific CENH3 antibody. We mixed the chromatins of C. japonica and Secale cereal (inbred line Lo7) to dilute the highly abundant centromeric Chio satellite repeats (16%) in the C. japonica genome before immunoprecipitation. In addition, to determine the large-scale genome organization, we performed ChIPseq by targeting the evolutionarily conserved eu- and heterochromatin-specific histone marks H3K4me2 and H33K9me2