Persistence of diet effects on the microbiota of Drosophila suzukii (Diptera: Drosophilidae)
Citation
Jiménez-Padilla, Y., Esan, E.O., Floate, K.D., Sinclair, B.J. (2020). Persistence of diet effects on the microbiota of Drosophila suzukii (Diptera: Drosophilidae). The Canadian Entomologist, [online] 152(4), 516-531. http://dx.doi.org/10.4039/tce.2020.37
Plain language summary
The guts of insects contain communities of microorganisms (the gut microbiome) that help their host to digest food. In the present study, we examined changes in the gut microbiome of the fly spotted wing Drosophila when reared for 3 generations on diets containing either blueberry, raspberry, or strawberry and then reared for a 4th generation on a banana-based diet. The gut microbiome was dominated by species of Proteobacteria (especially Acetobacteraceae) and Ascomycota fungi. We did not detect a change in the species diversity on these bacteria and fungi for flies reared for 1 generation on the different diets. We did detect a change for flies reared for 2 and 3 generations on these diets. These changes remained for at least 1 generation after flies were reared on the banana diet. These results show that the gut microbiome adjusts in response to changes in diet, which likely aids the survival of the host and may explain why spotted wing Drosophila has reached pest status on so many types of fruit.
Abstract
The insect commensal microbiota consists of prokaryotes and eukaryotes. We explored the effect of diet and the persistence of the gut microbiota across generations in Drosophila suzukii (Matsumura) (Diptera: Drosophilidae). We transferred subsets of a single population of D. suzukii to different fruit-based diets (blueberry (Vaccinium Linnaeus; Ericaceae), raspberry (Rubus Linnaeus; Rosaceae), and strawberry (Fragaria × ananassa Duchesne; Rosaceae)) for three generations and then returned them to a common, banana-based, diet. We used 16S rDNA (Bacteria) and ITS (internal transcribed spacer; Fungi) sequencing of female endosymbiont-free flies to identify the microbiota. We identified 2700 bacterial and 350 fungal operational taxonomic units (OTUs); there was no correlation between the number of bacterial and fungal OTUs in a sample. Bacterial communities were dominated by Proteobacteria (especially Acetobacteraceae); Ascomycota dominated the fungal communities. Species diversity of both bacteria and fungi differed among diets, but there were no differences in species-level diversity when these D. suzukii were returned to a control diet. A principle coordinates analysis revealed no differences in the bacterial or fungal community in the first generation on fruit diets, but that the communities diverged over the next two generations; neither fungal and bacterial communities converged after one generation on control food. We conclude that diet changes the D. suzukii microbiota, and that these changes persist for more than one generation.