Mark A. Hanson
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
Dec 1 at 7:59amWeb
Show threadMark A. HansonDec 1
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
Show threadMark A. HansonDec 1
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
Show threadMark A. HansonDec 1
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
Show threadMark A. HansonDec 1
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...
Show threadMark A. HansonDec 1
I'll also add, this is a preprint in the truest sense. The bulk of this work and its key finding were finished, and I did not want to let them languish in a file drawer indefinitely. But we plan to follow up some experiments before submitting to formal peer review and final version of record. 1b/2b
Show threadMark A. HansonDec 1
For example: in Hongbo's other study, he inoculated the microbiome with P. rettgeri JH10 and found broad increased mortality of the P. rettgeri-susceptible Zaprionus sp., supporting the microbiota angle. But we'd like to do this more systematically, and within this study's framing. 2b/2b.