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MBE Advance Access published online on November 6, 2008
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msn253
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Research Article

An ancient horizontal gene transfer between mosquito and the endosymbiotic bacterium Wolbachia pipientis

Megan Woolfit, Iñaki Iturbe-Ormaetxe, Elizabeth A. McGraw and Scott L. O'Neill*

School of Integrative Biology, University of Queensland, Brisbane 4072, Queensland, Australia

* Corresponding author Phone: +61 7 33652471, Fax: +61 7 33469213. Email: scott.oneill{at}uq.edu.au

Received for publication July 17, 2008. Revision received October 13, 2008. Accepted for publication November 1, 2008.

The extent and biological relevance of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) in eukaryotic evolution remains highly controversial. Recent studies have demonstrated frequent and large-scale HGT from endosymbiotic bacteria to their hosts, but the great majority of these transferred genes rapidly become non-functional in the recipient genome. Here we investigate an ancient horizontal gene transfer between a host metazoan and an endosymbiotic bacterium, Wolbachia pipientis. The transferred gene has so far been found only in mosquitoes and Wolbachia. In mosquitoes, it is a member of a gene family encoding candidate receptors required for malaria sporozoite invasion of the mosquito salivary gland. The gene copy in Wolbachia has substantially diverged in sequence from the mosquito homolog, is evolving under purifying selection, and is expressed, suggesting that this gene is also functional in the bacterial genome. Several lines of evidence indicate that the gene may have been transferred from eukaryotic host to bacterial endosymbiont. Regardless of the direction of transfer, however, these results demonstrate that interdomain horizontal gene transfer may give rise to functional, persistent and possibly evolutionarily significant new genes.

Key Words: endosymbiont • symbiosis • Wolbachia pipientis • Aedes aegypti • Anopheles gambiae • SGS


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