The Wolbachia "holy grail"
The once-obscure alpha-proteobacterium Wolbachia pipientis, was catapulted into medical relevance by the discovery that it inhibits the replication of RNA viruses . However, it was first discovered for its odd quirk of manipulating insect reproduction . That's right, Wolbachia were called "reproductive parasites" and for a long time, no fitness benefit was attributed to them. These intracellular masters do things like kill male offspring, feminize male offspring, induce parthenogenesis, and the most common phenotype, sperm-egg incompatibility (also known by its more complicated name: cytoplasmic incompatibility or CI) (Figure 1). Figure 1. Modified from Werren et al., 2008 . Wolbachia cause four distinct reproductive phenotypes in a range of arthropod orders (top). The mechanisms behind CI - meaning how does Wolbachia induce it - have been a mystery for some time. When you make a cross between infected males and uninfected...