ArticleCellular microbiology2020
Blind killing of both male and female Drosophila embryos by a natural variant of the endosymbiotic bacterium Spiroplasma poulsonii.
Article in Cellular microbiology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 15 citations in OpenAlex.
- Bacterial Symbionts Associated with Wild Tsetse Flies (Diptera: Glossinidae) in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Structure and Diversity of the Microbiome in Amazonian Sand Flies: Insights into Vector-Microbe Interactions.Microbial ecology · 2026Article
- Diverse toxin repertoire but limited metabolic capacities inferred from the draft genome assemblies of threeMicrobial genomics · 2025Article
- Endosymbiotic Male-KillingApplied and environmental microbiology · 2022Article
- Functional genomics of a Spiroplasma associated with the carmine cochineals Dactylopius coccus and Dactylopius opuntiae.BMC genomics · 2021Article
- Rapid molecular evolution ofMicrobial genomics · 2021Article
- Dual proteomics of Drosophila melanogaster hemolymph infected with the heritable endosymbiont Spiroplasma poulsonii.PloS one · 2021Article
- Growing Ungrowable Bacteria: Overview and Perspectives on Insect Symbiont Culturability.Microbiology and molecular biology reviews : MMBR · 2020Review
- Transformation of theApplied and environmental microbiology · 2020Article
- Blind killing of both male and female Drosophila embryos by a natural variant of the endosymbiotic bacterium Spiroplasma poulsonii.Cellular microbiology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Spiroplasma poulsonii is a vertically transmitted endosymbiont of Drosophila melanogaster that causes male-killing, that is the death of infected male embryos during embryogenesis. Here, we report a natural variant of S. poulsonii that is efficiently vertically transmitted yet does not selectively kill males, but kills rather a subset of all embryos regardless of their sex, a phenotype we call 'blind-killing'. We show that the natural plasmid of S. poulsonii has an altered structure: Spaid, the gene coding for the male-killing toxin, is deleted in the blind-killing strain, confirming its function as a male-killing factor. Then we further investigate several hypotheses that could explain the sex-independent toxicity of this new strain on host embryos. As the second non-male-killing variant isolated from a male-killing original population, this new strain raises questions on how male-killing is maintained or lost in fly populations. As a natural knock-out of Spaid, which is unachievable yet by genetic engineering approaches, this variant also represents a valuable tool for further investigations on the male-killing mechanism.
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