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Utah's Foremost Platform for Undergraduate Research Presentation
2021 Abstracts

Microbiome Effects on Drosophila melanogaster Metabolomics

Presenter: Sarah Gottfredson, College of Life Sciences, Plant and Wildlife Sciences
Authors: Sarah Gottfredson, John Chaston
Faculty Advisor: John Chaston, College of Life Sciences, Plant and Wildlife Sciences
Institution: Brigham Young University

The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has been used as a model species for genetic research for over a century and have also become a model species for host-microbiome research. The microbiome is known to have significant effects on the host D. melanogaster. Many of these effects like fecundity, lifespan, and starvation resistance have been studied. The mechanisms that underlie these physiological and behavioral influences are not as well understood. Therefore, my goal is to work to close this gap by defining the microbial influences on specific metabolite levels of the fruit fly. Specifically, I have already prepared replicate samples of fruit flies reared individually with 43 different bacterial strains to perform metabolomic analyses, which provide information about metabolite identity and abundance. When I obtain these data, I will run two types of analyses: 1) a global multivariate statistical analysis that reveals which metabolites are coregulated by different microorganisms and 2) a metabolite-specific metagenome-wide association that predicts bacterial genes responsible for variation in the abundance of each specific metabolite. Then, I will confirm the genomic predictions through mutant analysis. This metabolomic analysis will provide a deeper understanding on the mechanisms that underlie host-microbe influences.