Michele Castelli , Tiago Nardi, Michele Giovannini, Davide Sassera

Wolbachia bacteria encompass noteworthy reproductive manipulators of their arthropod hosts. which influence host reproduction to favour their own transmission, also exploiting toxin-antitoxin systems. Recently, multiple other bacterial symbionts of arthropods have been shown to display comparable manipulative capabilities.
Here we wonder whether such phenomena are truly restricted to arthropod hosts. We focused on protists, primary models for evolutionary investigations on eukaryotes due to their diversity and antiquity, but still overall under-investigated.
After a thorough re-examination of the literature on bacterial-protist interactions with this question in mind, we conclude that such bacterial “addictive manipulators” of protists do exist, are probably widespread, and have been overlooked until now as a consequence of the fact that investigations are commonly host-centred, thus ineffective to detect such behaviour.
Additionally, we posit that toxin-antitoxin systems are crucial in these phenomena of addictive manipulation of protists, as a result of recurrent evolutionary repurposing. This indicates intriguing functional analogy and molecular homology with plasmid-bacterial interplays.
Finally, we remark that multiple addictive manipulators are affiliated to specific bacterial lineages with ancient associations with diverse eukaryotes. This suggests a possible role of addictive manipulation of protists in paving the way to the evolution of bacteria associated with multicellular organisms.