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
Congrats to Hongbo who just defended his PhD & is starting a job in France this week! Hongbo supported this side project throughout, and did microbiota work in another recent preprint (link below).
And congrats to Millie whose MSc work was the (incidental) backbone of the diet*microbiota conundrum!
Effect of the microbiome on pa...
Mark A. Hanson
