Amount of venom that Leptopilina species inject into Drosophila melanogaster larvae in relation to parasitic success
2021
Lemauf, Séverine | Cazes, Dominique | Poirié, Marylène | Gatti, Jean-Luc | Institut Sophia Agrobiotech (ISA) ; Université Nice Sophia Antipolis (1965 - 2019) (UNS)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement (INRAE)-Université Côte d'Azur (UniCA) | Department of Plant Health and Environment (SPE) from the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE) | ANR-11-LABX-0028,SIGNALIFE,Réseau d'Innovation sur les Voies de Signalisation en Sciences de la Vie(2011) | ANR-15-IDEX-0001,UCA JEDI,Idex UCA JEDI(2015)
International audience
Show more [+] Less [-]English. The Drosophila endoparasitoid wasps Leptopilina boulardi and L. heterotoma (Hymenoptera: Cynipidae) are proovigenic species, i.e., females contain their lifetime number of mature eggs at emergence. They are therefore able to immediately parasitize many hosts when present. In response to parasitoid oviposition, the larval host D. melanogaster can mount an immune response, encapsulation, that can destroy the parasitoid eggs. This response is counteracted by the venom the wasp injects during oviposition. Here, we estimated the amount of venom injected into a D. melanogaster host larva using immunodetection of venom proteins and we attempted to correlate this amount with the number of eggs a female can lay on successive days. The venom reservoir of L. boulardi contains enough venom for at least 100 ovipositions while that of L. heterotoma contains venom for about 16 ovipositions. While a female L. boulardi may have enough venom for three days of parasitism when 20 or 40 larval hosts were presented each day, L. heterotoma certainly needs to synthesize new venom to parasitize the number of hosts offered. Interestingly, parasitism stopped (L. boulardi), egg protection (L. heterotoma) and egg hatching decreased (both species) after three days of parasitism. Thus, although venom does not appear to be a limiting factor for parasitism, our data suggest that it may have less effectiveness on the egg protection and on egg/host development after high repetitive egg laying.
Show more [+] Less [-]AGROVOC Keywords
Bibliographic information
This bibliographic record has been provided by Institut national de la recherche agronomique