Rifampicin

The aim was to produce Kenyan strains for release that were either not infected or infected by a Bwest Wolbachia strain, not present in Cameroon (Branca et al. 2019) . The variant of Wolbachia present in each strain was identified with the wsp gene AFLP test (Branca et al. 2011 (link)) using two individuals per population, before and after mass production in the laboratory. The Ki, Me and Ka populations that were infected with the Bwest variant of the bacterium were not cured of Wolbachia. The populations infected by both the A and Beast were cured from Wolbachia using a rifampicin (Sanofi-Aventis, France) treatment for one generation (Mochiah et al. 2002) . The absence of Wolbachia after treatment was confirmed by PCR test on DNA extraction.

For SLNas preparation, tripalmitin and palmitic acid were purchased from Fluka Chemie (Buchs, Switzerland), sodium taurocholate (ST), methyl α-D-mannopyranoside (MP) and cholesteryl myristate from TCI Europe (Zwijndrecht, Belgium), and Nile Red from Sigma-Aldrich Italia (Milan, Italy). Rifampicin (RIF) was a gift from Sanofi (Brindisi, Italy). For SLNas characterization, Simulated Lung Fluid (SLF) at pH 7.4 was used according to Marques et al (Marques et al., 2011) . The internal standard (IS) methyl parahydroxybenzoate was purchased from Carlo Erba Reagenti (Milan, Italy). For the cytotoxicity and cell internalization investigations, J774A.1 murine macrophage cell line from IZSLER (Brescia, Italy), cell culture reagents Dulbecco's Modification of Eagle's Medium (DMEM) with high glucose, L-glutamine, Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS), penicillin-streptomycin (P/S), non-essential amino acids (NEAA), and phosphate buffered saline (PBS) from EuroClone (Milan, Italy), Hoechst 33342 stain from ThermoFisher (Monza, Italy), and dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) from VWR (Milan, Italy) were purchased.