Study: Ancient virus gives wasps their sting

ByABC News
February 13, 2009, 10:25 PM

— -- "Who knows not where a wasp does wear his sting?" Shakespeare asks in Taming of the Shrew. "In his tail."

Most biologists would agree with the Bard, but a genetic peek inside some parasitic wasps suggests the story is a bit more complicated. The wasps' stings pack a punch partly due to paralyzing particles stripped out of an ancient virus, suggests a team led by Annie Bezier of France's Université François Rabelais.

"Many species of parasitoid wasps inject polydnavirus (virus-like) particles in order to manipulate host defenses and development," begins the study in the current Science magazine. What does that mean? Remember the exploding chest scene in the movie, Alien?

Yep, that's what the researchers are talking about some 17,500 wasp species that hunt down caterpillars and inject their eggs into them. The wasps also inject polydnavirus particles whose genes express proteins that paralyze the hapless caterpillars, disabling their immune system and growth, which allows the wasp embryos to feast from within until they kill their host and explode from the carcass to begin the cycle anew.

Pretty grisly stuff, but gardeners and farmers mostly see it as just desserts for the caterpillars. And since 1967, the paralysis particles have puzzled researchers as to their origin. Unlike real viruses, the particles don't reproduce after invading their host, and lack any genetic machinery to spawn. So, how did they get into wasps? Could something so nifty, which acted and looked exactly like toxins expressed by viruses, have developed independently through the evolution of ancestral wasps, or was there another explanation?

To find out, Bezier and colleagues cracked open wasp ovaries (the calyx) of distantly-related parasitic wasps, focusing on cotesia congregata wasps, which prey particularly on young tobacco hookworms. The calyx is the only place the wasp makes the viral particles, prior to injecting them into their soft-skinned egg incubators. There, within the genes of the wasps, they found the machinery for reproducing the particles. And then they compared those genes to known viruses, looking for a match, which they found within a family of viruses known to afflict moths, beetles, crickets and shrimp.