Self-stabilization mechanism encoded by a bacterial toxin facilitates reproductive parasitism

Abstract

A wide variety of maternally transmitted endosymbionts in insects are associated with reproductive parasitism, whereby they interfere with host reproduction to increase the ratio of infected females and spread within populations. Recent successes in identifying bacterial factors responsible for reproductive parasitism as well as further omics approaches have highlighted the common appearance of deubiquitinase domains, although their biological roles—in particular, how they link to distinct manipulative phenotypes—remain poorly defined. Spiroplasma poulsonii is a helical and motile bacterial endosymbiont of Drosophila, which selectively kills male progeny with a male-killing toxin Spaid (S. poulsonii androcidin), which encodes an ovarian tumor (OTU) deubiquitinase domain. Artificial expression of Spaid in flies reproduces male-killing-associated pathologies that include abnormal apoptosis and neural defects during embryogenesis; moreover, it highly accumulates on the dosage-compensated male X chromosome, congruent with cellular defects such as the DNA damage/chromatin bridge breakage specifically induced upon that chromosome. Here, I show that without the function of OTU, Spaid is polyubiquitinated and degraded through the host ubiquitin-proteasome pathway, leading to the attenuation of male-killing activity as shown previously. Furthermore, I find that Spaid utilizes its OTU domain to deubiquitinate itself in an intermolecular manner. Collectively, the deubiquitinase domain of Spaid serves as a self-stabilization mechanism to facilitate male killing in flies, optimizing a molecular strategy of endosymbionts that enables the efficient manipulation of the host at a low energetic cost.