View Program - 63rd Annual Drosophila Research Conference

The infectious and pandemic nature of obesity is known to have a multifaceted root cause and must be addressed in a multivariate manner. Recent efforts have implicated the gut microbiome to be correlated with obesity-related phenotypes in Drosophila. Our previous research explored the influence of the natural microbiota of rotten peach fruit consumed by Drosophila in the wild in comparison to the conventional corn-based lab diet. In this present study, we are particularly interested in peach (P) and strawberry (S) diets because of the presence of health-enhancing phytochemicals, dietary fibers, and unsaturated fatty acids. Therefore, we investigated the influence of microbiota in shaping obesity-related phenotypes in Drosophila by testing the influence of genotype, maternal, and dietary microbiota in rotten P and S diets in shaping life history and metabolic traits. Organic P and S fruits were naturally fermented for six days and assessed for microbial and phytochemical composition through 16SrRNA sequencing and GC-LS/MS, respectively. We sterilized embryos with hypochlorite and ethanol to eliminate maternal bacteria on the chorion before larval emergence and treated the fermented P and S diets with autoclaving and antibiotics. Autoclaving is a thermal and pressure treatment that transforms and denatures nutrients but eliminates all microbes present. Conversely, the antibiotics eliminate 99% of microbes without heat application, keeping the nutritional integrity of the food. Hence, we adopted a novel strategy of rearing larvae of three DGRP lines on the naturally fermented P and S diets simulating the wild environment and on autoclaved and antibiotic P and S diets, giving us insight into the interactions between these treatments and our measured phenotypes. We anticipate that our results will reveal similar microbial compositions in P and S diets in beta diversity and major taxa. We also predict that larvae raised on P and S diets will have significantly higher survival, weight, triglyceride, and faster developmental time which are obesity-related phenotypes compared to the autoclaved and antibiotic P and S diets. In sum, we expect to see significant interactive effects between diet, parental microbiome and fly genotype in shaping metabolic phenotypes of larvae

The Influence of Lab Manipulated Fermented Fruit and Maternally Inherited Microbiota on Metabolic Phenotype