A single synonymous nucleotide change impacts the male-killing phenotype of prophage WO gene wmk

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Issue Date
2021-10-22Author
Perlmutter, Jessamyn I.
Meyers, Jane E.
Bordenstein, Seth R.
Publisher
eLife Sciences Publications
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
Rights
Copyright Perlmutter et al. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.
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Wolbachia are the most widespread bacterial endosymbionts in animals. Within arthropods, these maternally transmitted bacteria can selfishly hijack host reproductive processes to increase the relative fitness of their transmitting females. One such form of reproductive parasitism called male killing, or the selective killing of infected males, is recapitulated to degrees by transgenic expression of the prophage WO-mediated killing (wmk) gene. Here, we characterize the genotype-phenotype landscape of wmk-induced male killing in D. melanogaster using transgenic expression. While phylogenetically distant wmk homologs induce no sex-ratio bias, closely-related homologs exhibit complex phenotypes spanning no death, male death, or death of all hosts. We demonstrate that alternative start codons, synonymous codons, and notably a single synonymous nucleotide in wmk can ablate killing. These findings reveal previously unrecognized features of transgenic wmk-induced killing and establish new hypotheses for the impacts of post-transcriptional processes in male killing variation. We conclude that synonymous sequence changes are not necessarily silent in nested endosymbiotic interactions with life-or-death consequences.
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Citation
Perlmutter, J. I., Meyers, J. E., & Bordenstein, S. R. (2021). A single synonymous nucleotide change impacts the male-killing phenotype of prophage WO gene wmk. eLife, 10, e67686. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.67686
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