Affiliation:
1. College of Life Sciences, Nankai University, Tianjin 300071, People's Republic of China
Abstract
Wolbachia
are the most widely distributed intracellular bacteria, and their most common effect on host phenotype is cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI). A variety of models have been proposed to decipher the molecular mechanism of CI, among which the host modification (HM) model predicts that
Wolbachia
effectors play an important role in sperm modification. However, owing to the complexity of spermatogenesis and testicular cell-type heterogeneity, whether
Wolbachia
have different effects on cells at different stages of spermatogenesis or whether these effects are linked with CI remains unknown. Therefore, we used single-cell RNA sequencing to analyse gene expression profiles in adult male
Drosophila
testes that were infected or uninfected by
Wolbachia
. We found that
Wolbachia
significantly affected the proportion of different types of germ cells and affected multiple metabolic pathways in germ cells. Most importantly,
Wolbachia
had the greatest impact on germline stem cells, resulting in dysregulated expression of genes related to DNA compaction, and
Wolbachia
infection also influenced the histone-to-protamine transition in the late stage of sperm development. These results support the HM model and suggest that future studies on
Wolbachia
-induced CI should focus on cells in the early stages of spermatogenesis.
Funder
National Natural Science Foundation of China
Subject
General Agricultural and Biological Sciences,General Environmental Science,General Immunology and Microbiology,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology,General Medicine
Cited by
6 articles.
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