Wolbachia pipientisAssociated With Tephritid Fruit Fly Pests: From Basic Research to Applications

Members of the true fruit flies (family Tephritidae) are among the most serious agricultural pests worldwide, whose control and management demands large and costly international efforts. The need for cost-effective and environmentally friendly integrated pest management (IPM) has led to the development and implementation of autocidal control strategies. These approaches include the widely used sterile insect technique and the incompatible insect technique (IIT). IIT relies on maternally transmitted bacteria (namelyWolbachia) to cause a conditional sterility in crosses between released mass-rearedWolbachia-infected males and wild females, which are either uninfected or infected with a differentWolbachiastrain (i.e., cytoplasmic incompatibility; CI). Herein, we review the current state of knowledge onWolbachia-tephritid interactions including infection prevalence in wild populations, phenotypic consequences, and their impact on life history traits. Numerous pest tephritid species are reported to harborWolbachiainfections, with a subset exhibiting high prevalence. The phenotypic effects ofWolbachiahave been assessed in very few tephritid species, due in part to the difficulty of manipulatingWolbachiainfection (removal or transinfection). Based on recent methodological advances (high-throughput DNA sequencing) and breakthroughs concerning the mechanistic basis of CI, we suggest research avenues that could accelerate generation of necessary knowledge for the potential use ofWolbachia-based IIT in area-wide integrated pest management (AW-IPM) strategies for the population control of tephritid pests.