The common endosymbiotic
Wolbachia bacteria influence arthropod hosts in multiple ways. They are mostly recognized for their manipulations of host reproduction, yet, more recent studies demonstrate that
Wolbachia also impact host behavior, metabolic pathways and immunity. Besides their biological and evolutionary roles,
Wolbachia are new potential biological control agents for pest and vector management. Importantly,
Wolbachia-based control strategies require controlled symbiont transfer between host species and predictable outcomes of novel
Wolbachia-host associations. Theoretically, this artificial horizontal transfer could inflict genetic changes within transferred
Wolbachia populations. This could be facilitated through
de novo mutations in the novel recipient host or changes of haplotype frequencies of polymorphic
Wolbachia populations when transferred from donor to recipient hosts. Here we show that
Wolbachia resident in the European cherry fruit fly,
Rhagoletis cerasi, exhibit ancestral and cryptic sequence polymorphism in three symbiont genes, which are exposed upon microinjection into the new hosts
Drosophila simulans and
Ceratitis capitata. Our analyses of
Wolbachia in microinjected
D. simulans over 150 generations after microinjection uncovered infections with multiple
Wolbachia strains in trans-infected lines that had previously been typed as single infections. This confirms the persistence of low-titer
Wolbachia strains in microinjection experiments that had previously escaped standard detection techniques. Our study demonstrates that infections by multiple
Wolbachia strains can shift in prevalence after artificial host transfer driven by either stochastic or selective processes. Trans-infection of
Wolbachia can claim fitness costs in new hosts and we speculate that these costs may have driven the shifts of
Wolbachia strains that we saw in our model system.
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