Of particular interest to the #Drosophila community: in this study, we reveal that the #antimicrobial Diptericin B is uniquely attuned to control Acetobacter #bacteria, of the 2 most common #microbiome members of flies 🦠. In flies without DptB, a non-essential #immune effector, Acetobacter is virulent and kills alongside a severe bloating phenotype.

If you've seen bloating in your fly, it may be an interaction causing gut leakage and Acetobacter systemic #infection 🤯 !!

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.23.521774v2.article-metrics

"While the evolution of immune genes is often interpreted with host phylogeny as a principle explanatory factor [7,46], host ecology can be a stronger driver of microbiome community structure [47]. ... Here we identify how specific effectors evolved to constrain the growth of specific microbes, finding that host ecology, not host phylogeny, makes sense of effector-microbe specificity."

Lines we wrote following some nice work by @markella_moraitou 🙂 : https://ecoevo.social/@markella_moraitou/109512928477762470