Enhancement of Aedes aegypti susceptibility to dengue by Wolbachia is not supported

Tags: Aedes, Arbovirus, Dengue, Gene drive synthetic, Genetic biocontrol, Resistance, Wolbachia
T. H. Ant, M.-V. Mancini, J. Martinez and S. P. Sinkins, Nature Communications, 11:6111. 2020.

Releases of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes carrying Wolbachia to block the transmission of dengue virus (DENV) are currently being deployed as a novel dengue control strategy in a number of countries, with very encouraging results^1,2. In their paper entitled “Variation in Wolbachia effects on Aedes mosquitoes as a determinant of invasiveness and vectorial capacity”, King et al.³ used DENV infection and transmission modelling to reinterpret experimental data from two previous studies^4,5. The authors claimed that wMel Wolbachia increase the mean susceptibility of Ae. aegypti to DENV, contradicting various other studies^{6,7,8,9,10,11,12}. Here, we raise concerns with the experimental approaches used to generate one of the primary datasets on which the modelling is based, and we discuss how these limitations could make some of the original conclusions misleading.