Reply to: “Enhancement of Aedes aegypti susceptibility to dengue by Wolbachia is not supported”
Reply to: “Enhancement of Aedes aegypti susceptibility to dengue by Wolbachia is not supported”
Tags: Aedes, Arbovirus, Dengue, Gene drive synthetic, Genetic biocontrol, Resistance, WolbachiaC. Souto-Maior, J. G. King, L. M. Sartori, R. Maciel-de-Freitas and M. G. M. Gomes, Nature Communications, 11:6113. 2020.
We recently reanalysed previously published datasets (Souto-Maior et al.1 and Ferguson et al.2). Using mathematical and statistical models based on these data, we showed that Wolbachia strain wMel increases mean and variance of Aedes aegypti susceptibility to infection by dengue viruses3. Ant et al.4 claim that concerns with the data and broader analysis make our conclusions misleading. We herein respond to their comments by demonstrating the robustness of our results to different treatments of the data, and expand our arguments for replacing currently adopted methods by those introduced in our paper.
