The Mediterranean fruit fly (medfly) Ceratitis capitata (Diptera: Tephritidae) is a worldwide pest of agriculture. A deeper understanding of its biology is key to control medfly populations and thus reduce economic impact. Embryo microinjection is a fundamental tool allowing both germ-line transformation and reverse genetics studies in this species.
The Mediterranean fruit fly (medfly) Ceratitis capitata (Wiedemann) (Diptera: Tephritidae) is a pest species with extremely high agricultural relevance. This is due to its reproductive behavior: females damage the external surface of fruits and vegetables when they lay eggs and the hatched larvae feed on their pulp. Wild C. capitata populations are traditionally controlled through insecticide spraying and/or eco-friendly approaches, the most successful being the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT). The SIT relies on mass-rearing, radiation-based sterilization and field release of males that retain their capacity to mate but are not able to generate fertile progeny. The advent and the subsequent rapid development of biotechnological tools, together with the availability of the medfly genome sequence, has greatly boosted our understanding of the biology of this species. This favored the proliferation of new strategies for genome manipulation, which can be applied to population control.
In this context, embryo microinjection plays a dual role in expanding the toolbox for medfly control. The ability to interfere with the function of genes that regulate key biological processes, indeed, expands our understanding of the molecular machinery underlying medfly invasiveness. Furthermore, the ability to achieve germ-line transformation facilitates the production of multiple transgenic strains that can be tested for future field applications in novel SIT settings. Indeed, genetic manipulation can be used to confer desirable traits that can, for example, be used to monitor sterile male performance in the field, or that can result in early life-stage lethality. Here we describe a method to microinject nucleic acids into medfly embryos to achieve these two main goals.
The Mediterranean fruit fly (medfly) Ceratitis capitata is a cosmopolitan species that extensively damages fruits and cultivated crops. It belongs to the Tephritidae family, which includes several pest species, such as those belonging to the genera Bactrocera and Anastrepha. The medfly is the most studied species of this family, and it has become a model not only for the study of insect invasions1, but also for optimizing pest management strategies2.
The medfly is a multivoltine species that can attack more than 300 species of wild and cultivated plants3,4. The damage is caused by both the adults and the larval stages: mated females pierce the surface of the fruit for oviposition, allowing microorganisms to affect their commercial quality, whereas the larvae feed on the fruit pulp. After three larval stages, larvae emerge from the host and pupate into the soil. Ceratitis capitata displays an almost worldwide distribution, including Africa, the Middle-East, Western Australia, Central and South America, Europe, and areas of the United States5.
The most common strategies to limit medfly infestations involve the use of insecticides (e.g., Malathion, Spinosad) and the environmentally-friendly Sterile Insect Technique (SIT)6. The latter approach involves the release into the wild of hundreds of thousands of males rendered sterile by exposure to ionizing irradiation. The mating of such sterilized males to wild females results in no progeny, causing a reduction in population size, eventually leading to eradication. Although SIT has proven effective in multiple campaigns worldwide, its major drawbacks include the high costs of rearing and sterilizing millions of insects to be released. Marking of released individuals is necessary to distinguish sterile from wild insects captured in the field during monitoring activities and it is currently achieved using fluorescent powders. These procedures are costly and have undesirable side-effects7.
In order to optimize and/or to develop more effective approaches for the control of this pest, medfly biology and genetics have been widely explored by numerous researchers worldwide. The availability of the medfly genome sequence8,9, will facilitate novel investigations on gene functions. RNA interference is a powerful tool for such studies and it can be achieved through the microinjection of dsRNA (double-stranded RNA) or siRNA (small interfering RNA). This technique has been used, for example, to demonstrate that the sex determination molecular cascade in C. capitata is only partially conserved with respect to that of Drosophila10.
The development of protocols to microinject medfly embryos allowed C. capitata to be the first non-Drosophilid fly species to be genetically modified. As its eggs are similar to those of Drosophila, both in terms of morphology and resistance to desiccation11, the protocol to deliver plasmid DNA into pre-blastoderm embryos first developed for D. melanogaster12,13 was initially adapted for use in C. capitata. These first experiments allowed medfly germ-line transformation based on the transposable element Minos11. Subsequently, the original system was modified14 using other transposon-based approaches. This is the case of piggyBac from the Lepidoptera Trichoplusia ni15. The protocol has since been further optimized and this has permitted the transformation of other tephritid species16-21 and also of many other Diptera22-31. All these systems rely on the use of a typical binary vector/helper plasmid transformation system: artificial, defective transposons containing desired genes are assembled into plasmid DNA and integrated into the genome of the insect by supplying the transposase enzyme32. A number of transgenic medfly lines have been generated, with multiple features including strains carrying a conditional dominant lethal gene that induces lethality, strains producing male-only progeny and thus not requiring additional sexing strategies, and strains with fluorescent sperm, which may enhance the accuracy of the SIT monitoring phase33-37. Although the release in the wild of transgenic organisms has occurred in pilot tests against mosquitoes only38,39, at least one company is evaluating a number of transgenic medfly strains for their use in the field40.
Embryo microinjection can also favor the development of new genome-editing tools, such as transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) / CRISPR associated protein 9 nuclease (Cas9) and homing endonucleases genes (HEGs), which will enable novel evolutionary and developmental studies, as well as expanding the available biotechnological toolbox. Genome-editing approaches already allowed the generation of gene-drive systems in mosquitoes41, and their transfer to the medfly is imminent. Here we describe a universal protocol for microinjecting nucleic acids in medfly embryos that can be useful for all the above mentioned applications.
Microinjection of nucleic acids in insect embryos is a universal technique that facilitates both the analysis of gene function and biotechnological applications.
The recent publication of the genome sequences from an increasing number of insect species leads to an urgent need for tools for the functional characterization of genes of yet unknown function. RNA-interference has proven to be one of the most valuable methods to infer molecular functions49 and embryo microinjection facili…
The authors have nothing to disclose.
The authors would like to thank all the members of the “Insect Genetics and Genomics” Laboratory, in particular to Lorenzo Ghiringhelli who has worked at developing, adapting and maintaining the rearing of the medfly over the past thirty years. Part of the representative results of this paper have been reprinted from N. Biotechnology, 25(1) by Scolari F. et al., Fluorescent sperm marking to improve the fight against the pest insect Ceratitis capitata (Wiedemann; Diptera: Tephritidae), 76-84, 2008, with permission from Elsevier (License number 3796240759880). This work received support from Cariplo-Regione Lombardia “IMPROVE” (FS).
1 x injection Buffer | 0.1 mM phosphate buffer pH 7.4, 5 mM KCl | ||
Construct Plasmid | |||
Helper Plasmid | |||
dsRNA | Phenol-Chloroform purified | ||
Standard Larval food | 1.5 L H<sub>2</sub>O, 100 ml HCl 1%, 5 g broad-spectrum antimicrobial agent used in pharmaceutical products dissolved in 50 ml of ethanol, 400 g sugar, 175 g demineralized brewer's yeast, 1 kg soft wheat bran | ||
Carrot Larval Food | 2.5 g agar, 4 g sodium benzoate, 4.5 ml 37% HCl, 42 g yeast extract, 115 g carrot powder, 2.86 g broad-spectrum antimicrobial agent , water to 1 L | ||
Adult Food | yeast extract and sugar (1:10) | ||
Microscope slides | Sigma-Aldrich | Z692247 | |
Injection needles | Eppendorf | 5242956000 | |
Microloaders | Eppendorf | 5242956003 | |
Double slided tape | |||
Whatman Black circle paper | Sigma-Aldrich | Z695505 | |
Bleach | Diluite 1:2 before use | ||
Paintbrush (000) | |||
Micromanipulator | Narishige | MN-153 | |
Microinjector | Eppendorf | Femtojet | |
Adult cages | |||
Chlorotrifluoroethylene oil | Sigma-Aldrich | H8898 | |
<em>Ceratitis capitata</em> | The strain used is ISPRA |