Evolutionary Applications (2022) 15, 1621-1638

Virginie Ravigné, Nathalie Becker, François Massol, Erwan Guichoux, Christophe Boury, Frédéric Mahé and Benoit Facon (2022)
Fruit fly phylogeny imprints bacterial gut microbiota
Evolutionary Applications 15 (10), 1621-1638
Abstract: One promising avenue for reconciling the goals of crop production and ecosystem preservation consists in the manipulation of beneficial biotic interactions, such as between insects and microbes. Insect gut microbiota can affect host fitness by contributing to development, host immunity, nutrition, or behavior. However, the determinants of gut microbiota composition and structure, including host phylogeny and host ecology, remain poorly known. Here, we used a well-studied community of eight sympatric fruit fly species to test the contributions of fly phylogeny, fly specialization, and fly sampling environment on the composition and structure of bacterial gut microbiota. Comprising both specialists and generalists, these species belong to five genera from to two tribes of the Tephritidae family. For each fly species, one field and one laboratory samples were studied. Bacterial inventories to the genus level were produced using 16S metabarcoding with the Oxford Nanopore Technology. Sample bacterial compositions were analyzed with recent network-based clustering techniques. Whereas gut microbiota were dominated by the Enterobacteriaceae family in all samples, microbial profiles varied across samples, mainly in relation to fly identity and sampling environment. Alpha diversity varied across samples and was higher in the Dacinae tribe than in the Ceratitinae tribe. Network analyses allowed grouping samples according to their microbial profiles. The resulting groups were very congruent with fly phylogeny, with a significant modulation of sampling environment, and with a very low impact of fly specialization. Such a strong imprint of host phylogeny in sympatric fly species, some of which share much of their host plants, suggests important control of fruit flies on their gut microbiota through vertical transmission and/or intense filtering of environmental bacteria.
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Database assignments for author(s): Benoît Facon

Research topic(s) for pests/diseases/weeds:
general biology - morphology - evolution

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Pest and/or beneficial records:

Beneficial	Pest/Disease/Weed	Crop/Product	Country	Quarant.
	Bactrocera dorsalis		Reunion Island
	Ceratitis capitata		Reunion Island
	Zeugodacus cucurbitae		Reunion Island
	Dacus ciliatus		Reunion Island
	Bactrocera zonata		Reunion Island
	Neoceratitis cyanescens		Reunion Island
	Dacus demmerezi		Reunion Island
	Ceratitis quilicii		Reunion Island