Miwa WenzelI am exploring the evolutionary and functional relationship between Drosophila and the endosymbiont bacteria Wolbachia. My main project focuses on searching for evidence of historic Wolbachia infections in Drosophila. Recent Wolbachia infections have been well documented, with Wolbachia presence reported in both reproductive and somatic tissues of Drosophila, as well as a myriad other arthropods and nematodes. Additionally, entire Wolbachia genomes or segments of them have been found integrated into Drosophila genomes. These Wolbachia insertions are often intact and easily recognizable, suggesting a more recent infection of Wolbachia in the population. On the other hand, evidence of historic infections remains unexplored. By employing a k-mer sequence matching program found useful to detect evidence of past viral and transposable element infections in mammals, I am testing for evidence of older Wolbachia insertions to help shed light on various questions, such as, have multiple Wolbachia strains infected the same lineage of Drosophila? And what is the earliest Wolbachia infection that we can detect? With answers to questions such as these, we can better understand the manipulative properties of Wolbachia as a parasite, specifically its interaction with the rapidly evolving bag of marbles germline stem cell gene.
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