Speaker
Description
Insects developing on ephemeral patches are always pressed by resource depletion. Host- associated microbial communities (microbiota) may alleviate this stress by interacting with the substrate and temporarily stabilizing the developmental environment. Drosophila melanogaster is breeding on patches of different rotting fruits. Due to the variability of patches, microbial symbionts need to be flexibly adjusted to fluctuating properties. Adult flies replenish their microbiota pool through feeding (horizontal transmission); however, larvae depend on parental feces for microbiota and thus resource availability. This interaction likely results in distinct microbiota forming in different resource patches and possibly over different timescales. As this may influence developmental success of flies, we were interested in the variability of microbial communities that female flies transfer during egg laying. We associated a lab strain of flies with a variety of fruits, previously visited by flying insects in the field (microbiota pool). Egg and microbe disposition was forced on one substrate type (substrate filter), followed by transfer to a new microcosms (isolation). Hence only microbes that allowed fly development on a given substrate type were present in the next generation of adult fly’s fecal material. Using metabarcoding, we identified distinct bacterial and fungal symbiont communities associated with different substrate types, and we were able to link these communities to specific substrate properties.
