Wolbachia Establishment and Invasion in an Aedes aegypti Laboratory Population

Abstract

A proposed strategy to aid in controlling the growing burden of vector-borne disease is population replacement, in which a natural vector population is replaced by a population with a reduced capacity for disease transmission. An important component of such a strategy is the drive system, which serves to spread a desired genotype into the targeted field population. Endosymbiotic Wolbachia bacteria are potential transgene drivers, but infections do not naturally occur in some important mosquito vectors, notably Aedes aegypti . In this work, stable infections of w AlbB Wolbachia were established in A. aegypti and caused high rates of cytoplasmic incompatibility (that is, elimination of egg hatch). Laboratory cage tests demonstrated the ability of w AlbB to spread into an A. aegypti population after seeding of an uninfected population with infected females, reaching infection fixation within seven generations.