Paper for the
#Drosophila community on a food recipe that rears dozens of species. This was a full team effort, with key contributions from UG, MSc, and PhD students! 👩🎓🎉
Plus an
#infection observation re: Diet x
#Microbiota 🦠
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
#EvolBiol #AcademicSky #SymbioSky
1/4
The recipe rears specialists and generalists alike. Notes:
1. It works for almost every species we've tried.
2. It performs about as well or better for rearing success as other diets across species.
3. It supports a rich microbiota.
4. That rich microbiota might affect infection experiments.
2/4
TLDR: we found elevated clean injury mortality if we flipped infected flies on this food. But we could rescue it by just flipping them on "fly McDonalds" instead - high sugar, low microbiota Corn.
This confounded our phylogenetic infection experiment, but at least we learned something from it!
3/4
This caveat of microbiota differences might impact some experiments.
Using a quite traumatic "stab 'em" approach, diet/microbiota made a difference in our case.
But: i) You can rear on Prop, but flip on Corn & problem solved. ii) In some cases, a rich microbiota may be a feature, not a bug.
4/4
Mark A. Hanson
