Bacterial Communities of Diverse Drosophila Species: Ecological Context of a Host–Microbe Model System

By James Angus Chandler, Jenna Morgan Lang, Srijak Bhatnagar, Jonathan A. Eisen, A. Kopp. PLoS Genetics, 2011

723 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Drosophila melanogaster is emerging as an important model of non-pathogenic host–microbe interactions. The genetic and experimental tractability of Drosophila has led to significant gains in our understanding of animal–microbial symbiosis. However, the full implications of these results cannot be appreciated without the knowledge of the microbial communities associated with natural Drosophila populations. In particular, it is not clear whether laboratory cultures can serve as an accurate model of host–microbe interactions that occur in the wild, or those that have occurred over evolutionary time. To fill this gap, we characterized natural bacterial communities associated with 14 species of Drosophila and related genera collected from distant geographic locations. To represent the ecological diversity of Drosophilids, examined species included fruit-, flower-, mushroom-, and cactus-feeders. In parallel, wild host populations were compared to laboratory strains, and controlled experiments were performed to assess the importance of host species and diet in shaping bacterial microbiome composition. We find that Drosophilid flies have taxonomically restricted bacterial communities, with 85% of the natural bacterial microbiome composed of only four bacterial families. The dominant bacterial taxa are widespread and found in many different host species despite the taxonomic, ecological, and geographic diversity of their hosts. Both natural surveys and laboratory experiments indicate that host diet plays a major role in shaping the Drosophila bacterial microbiome. Despite this, the internal bacterial microbiome represents only a highly reduced subset of the external bacterial communities, suggesting that the host exercises some level of control over the bacteria that inhabit its digestive tract. Finally, we show that laboratory strains provide only a limited model of natural host–microbe interactions. Bacterial taxa used in experimental studies are rare or absent in wild Drosophila populations, while the most abundant associates of natural Drosophila populations are rare in the lab.

Subfields: Immunology, Insect Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/16ca8dd5583b6659ec3400f33cf09ebb457e1ccb

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Citations in the corpus

Social behavior and the microbiome (2015, background): “For instance, social partners could be colonized by similar microbes due to contact with shared environmental sources, or behavioral similarities between partners could create similar ecological niches within microbial communities, particularly through consumption of similar diets [29,30].”
Current knowledge of interactions between Drosophila suzukii and microbes, and their potential utility for pest management (2016, background): “…community associated with Drosophila, the bacterial microbiome of different populations and species are dominated by few bacterial groups such as Enterobacteriales, Rhodospirillales and Lactobacillales (Chandler et al. 2011; Broderick and Lemaitre 2012; Chandler et al. 2012; Wong et al. 2011).”
The gut microbiota of insects - diversity in structure and function. (2013, background): “…in dynamic insect gut communities Even when gut communities associated with an insect species are strongly influenced by diet or location, one or a few bacterial taxa may be shared across most or all hosts (Broderick et al., 2004; Chandler et al., 2011; Schauer et al., 2012; Aharon et al., 2013).”
Multiorganismal Insects: Diversity and Function of Resident Microorganisms (2014, background): “melanogaster strains reared on the same food (21, 121), suggesting that the microbiota may not be shaped exclusively by deterministic factors (e.”