Complete genome assembly of the <i>Wolbachia</i> endosymbiont of the horn fly <i>Haematobia irritans irritans:</i> a supergroup A strain with multiple horizontally acquired cytoplasmic incompatibility genes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The horn fly, Haematobia irritans irritans , is a hematophagous parasite of livestock distributed throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Welfare losses on livestock due to horn fly infestation are estimated to cost between USD 1-2.5 billion annually in North America and Brazil. The endosymbiotic bacterium Wolbachia pipientis is a maternally inherited manipulator of reproductive biology in arthropods and naturally infects laboratory colonies of horn flies from Kerrville, USA and Alberta, Canada, but has also been identified in wild-caught samples from Canada, USA, Mexico and Hungary. Reassembly of PacBio long-read and Illumina genomic DNA libraries from the Kerrville H. i. irritans genome project allowed for a complete and circularised 1.3 Mb Wolbachia genome ( w Hae). Annotation of w Hae yielded 1249 coding genes, 34 tRNAs, three rRNAs, and five prophage regions. Comparative genomics and whole genome Bayesian evolutionary analysis of w Hae compared to published Wolbachia genomes suggests that w Hae is most closely related to and diverged from Wolbachia supergroup A strains known to infect Drosophila spp. Whole-genome synteny analyses between w Hae and closely related genomes indicates that w Hae has undergone convoluted genome rearrangements while maintaining high nucleotide identity. Comparative analysis of the cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI) genes of w Hae suggests two phylogenetically distinct CI loci and acquisition of another CifB homolog from phylogenetically distant supergroup A Wolbachia strains suggesting horizontal acquisition of these loci. The w Hae genome provides a resource for future examination of the impact Wolbachia may have in both biocontrol and potential insecticide resistance of horn flies. Importance Horn flies, Haematobia irritans , are obligate hematophagous parasites of cattle having significant effects on production and animal welfare. Control of horn flies mainly relies on the use of insecticides, but issues with resistance have increased interest in development of alternative means of control. Wolbachia pipientis is an endosymbiont bacterium known to have a range of effects on host reproduction such as induction of cytoplasmic incompatibility, feminization, male killing, and also impacts on vector transmission. These characteristics of Wolbachia have been exploited in biological control approaches for a range of insect pests. Here we report the assembly and annotation of the circular genome of the Wolbachia strain of the Kerrickville, USA horn fly ( w Hae). Annotation of w Hae suggests its unique features including the horizontal acquisition of additional transcriptionally active cytoplasmic incompatibility loci. This study will provide the foundation for future Wolbachia- induced biological effect studies for control of horn flies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".