TY - JOUR T1 - Is it time to retire <em>Wolbachia</em> multilocus sequence typing (MLST)? JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/133710 SP - 133710 AU - Christoph Bleidorn AU - Michael Gerth Y1 - 2017/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/03/133710.abstract N2 - Alphaproteobacteria of the genus Wolbachia constitute the most common animal endosymbiont on earth. Analyses of strain diversity and evolutionary relationships of these bacteria often rely on multilocus sequence typing (MLST), where sequence data of five selected housekeeping genes are used for allele designation. Typically, phylogenetic and phylogeographic relationships, as well as questions regarding horizontal transmission are addressed with Wolbachia MLST. However, given frequent recombination and limited phylogenetic informativeness of the Wolbachia MLST genes we argue that these markers are unsuited to infer phylogenetic relationships of closely related strains, to detect recent horizontal transmissions or to assess movements between populations on an ecological timescale. Instead of relying on Wolbachia MLST, we suggest genome-scale approaches for all analyses dealing with phylogenetic approaches, whereas for studies screening the prevalence of Wolbachia strains across potential hosts single or few genes (e.g., ftsz and wsp) are sufficient. ER -