Wolbachia bacteria, which have been identified in many insects including mosquitoes, are intracellular bacteria and can be transmitted vertically. Despite numerous studies on the prevalence of Wolbachia in Cimex lectularis population, no published studies have reported on this topic among tropical bedbug’s populations in Iran. The present study was conducted to investigate the molecular prevalence of Wolbachia bacteria among tropical bedbug from Mashhad city. Bed bugs were collected from different areas of Mashhad city. The sampling locations in- cluded old apartments and workers\\\' dormitories. In total, 35 bed bug isolates were collected and identified as Cimex hemipterus. The molecular identification method of Wolbachia bacteria was performed based on the Wolbachia surface protein (WSP) and comparison with other registered Wolbachia sequences in the Gene- Bank.According to the present study, 13 isolates out of 35 populations of C. hemipterus (37.14%) were found to be infected with Wolbachia. The sequences obtained from this study were edited, aligned and compared to ho-mologous sequences in GenBank. The results showed 97.35%, 95.71% and 95.60% identity with WSP gene sequence of C. hemipterus, C. lectularius and C. vicarious, respectively. The phylogenetic tree based on WSP gene showed that Wobachia with C. hemipterus origin were clusterd together as a clade and sequenced WSP gene in this study was placed in this clade. This is the first study on Wobachia endosymbiont bacterium in C. hemipterus in Iran.

Keywords