Strong responses of Drosophila melanogaster microbiota to developmental temperature

Abstract

Physiological responses to changes in environmental conditions such as temperature may partly arise from the resident microbial community that integrates a wide range of bio-physiological aspects of the host. In the present study, we assessed the effect of developmental temperature on the thermal tolerance and microbial community of Drosophila melanogaster. We also developed a bacterial transplantation protocol in order to examine the possibility of reshaping the host bacterial composition and assessed its influence on the thermotolerance phenotype. We found that the temperature during development affected thermal tolerance and the microbial composition of male D. melanogaster. Flies that developed at low temperature (13°C) were the most cold resistant and showed the highest abundance of Wolbachia, while flies that developed at high temperature (31°C) were the most heat tolerant and had the highest abundance of Acetobacter. In addition, feeding newly eclosed flies with bacterial suspensions from intestines of flies developed at low temperatures changed the heat tolerance of recipient flies. However, we were not able to link this directly to a change in the host bacterial composition.

Transgenerational inheritance of cold temperature response in Drosophila

“…This supported the original indirect evidence on fecal transfer that paternally acquired bacteria contribute to transcriptional responses observed in the offspring of cold-exposed fathers [1]. The contribution of acquired microbiota in offspring transcriptional responses seems consistent with previous studies showing an influence of gut microbiota on thermal phenotype [20] and a correlation of gut microbiome load with cold tolerance in D. melanogaster [21] as well as an association between the gut microbiota composition and host physiology in cold tolerance in the field cricket Gryllus veletis [22]. Indeed, emerging evidence increasingly support, across species, microbiome-germline interaction and bacteriamediated transgenerational inheritance [23,24].…”

The microbiota influences the Drosophila melanogaster life history strategy

“…While all the details to address this gap are unknown, our data confirm that both environmental and host genetic influences together contribute to these processes: wild flies reared in the laboratory for only a few generations failed to display the same patterns in microbiota composition as wild-caught flies, and wild flies reared in the laboratory with a defined starting set of microbes displayed key differences in their microbiota composition as adults. The environmental characters responsible for the variation could include temperature or diet (Chandler et al, 2011;Moghadam et al, 2018;Staubach et al, 2013), and at least some genetic factors that shape the microbiota composition of D. melanogaster have been described (Broderick, Buchon, & Lemaitre, 2014;Dobson et al, 2015). An additional or alternative explanation is that the characteristics described for laboratory flies may not reflect the biology of wild flies, since the interactions of Drosophila and their microbiota can vary depending if the partners are from the wild or the laboratory (Blum, Fischer, Miles, & Handelsman, 2013;Gould et al, 2018;Inamine et al, 2018;Obadia et al, 2017;Pais, Valente, Sporniak, & Teixeira, 2018;Winans et al, 2017).…”

Seasonal shifts in the insect gut microbiome are concurrent with changes in cold tolerance and immunity

“…In a similar manner, Wolbachia spp. are more prevalent in the gut tissue microbiome in Drosophila melanogaster reared at 13°C compared to 31°C (Moghadam et al., ), which suggests that Wolbachia spp. associated with insect guts may be psychrophilic.…”