Wolbachia is an obligate intracellular Gram-negative alpha-proteobacterium that has diverse effects on reproduction of arthropod hosts, including cytoplasmic incompatibility, male killing, feminization, and parthenogenesis. Some of these effects have important potential for control of insect pests, including mosquitoes that vector pathogens of humans. In mosquitoes, and in most other arthropods, elimination of Wolbachia by antibiotic treatment has no effect on host survival and reverses the Wolbachia-associated phenotype. Elimination of Wolbachia strain wFol, which enables parthenogenetic reproduction of the Collembolan, Folsomia candida, would result in population extinction. However, F. candida adults remain viable and resume reproduction when antibiotics are removed, suggesting that wFol survives antibiotic treatment in a quiescent persister state similar to that induced by chromosomally encoded toxin–antitoxin (TA) modules in free-living bacteria. Computational approaches were used to document the presence of antitoxin genes upstream of Wolbachia RelE/ParE, Fic, and AbiEii toxin genes. Moreover, this analysis revealed that Wolbachia RatA toxin is encoded by a single copy gene associated with an ssrS noncoding RNA gene. Documentation of potentially functional TA modules expands our understanding of the metabolic capabilities of Wolbachia, and provides an explanation for variable and sometimes contradictory results of antibiotic treatments. The presence of chromosomal TA modules in Wolbachia genomes suggests that wFol, and potentially other strains of Wolbachia, can enter a quiescent persister state.

Wolbachia是一种专性的细胞内革兰氏阴性α-变形杆菌，对节肢动物宿主的繁殖具有多种影响，包括细胞质不相容，雄性杀死，女性化和孤雌生殖。这些影响中的某些具有控制害虫的重要潜力，包括控制人类病原体的蚊子。在蚊子和大多数其他节肢动物中，通过抗生素治疗消除Wolbachia对宿主存活没有影响，并且逆转了与Wolbachia相关的表型。消除Wolbachia菌株w Fol，使Collembolan，Folsomia candida单性繁殖，将导致种群灭绝。然而，念珠菌成虫仍然存活并在去除抗生素后恢复繁殖，这表明w Fol在静止的持久状态下仍能经受住抗生素治疗，类似于在自由生存细菌中由染色体编码的毒素-抗毒素（TA）模块诱导的状态。使用计算方法来证明Wolbachia RelE / ParE，Fic和AbiEii毒素基因上游存在抗毒素基因。此外，该分析揭示了沃尔巴克氏菌大鼠毒素由与ssrS非编码RNA基因相关的单拷贝基因编码。潜在功能性TA模块的文档扩展了我们对Wolbachia代谢能力的理解，并解释了抗生素治疗的结果有时可能会相互矛盾。Wolbachia基因组中的染色体TA模块的存在表明w Fol和Wolbachia的其他潜在菌株可以进入静态持久性状态。