High Incidence of Related Across Unrelated Leaf-Mining Diptera

The maternally inherited endosymbiont, plays an important role in the ecology and evolution of many of its hosts by affecting host reproduction and fitness. Here, we investigated 13 dipteran leaf-mining species to characterize infections and the potential for this endosymbiont in biocontrol. infections were present in 12 species, including 10 species where the infection was at or near fixation. A comparison of relatedness based on the /MLST gene set showed that unrelated leaf-mining species often shared similar , suggesting common horizontal transfer. We established a colony of and found adult density was stable; although density differed between the sexes, with females having a 20-fold higher density than males. density increased during development, with higher densities in pupae than larvae. We removed using tetracycline and performed reciprocal crosses between -infected and uninfected individuals. Cured females crossed with infected males failed to produce offspring, indicating that induced complete cytoplasmic incompatibility in . The results highlight the potential of to suppress pests based on approaches such as the incompatible insect technique, where infected males are released into populations lacking or with a different incompatible infection.