Presenter: Brittany Burnside
Authors: Brittany Burnside
Faculty Advisor: John Chaston
Institution: Brigham Young University
Multifaceted relationships between environmental elements, host genome, and microbiome have long been topics of research on Drosophila melanogaster. Although many of these relationships are understood, many remain to be established. This is especially true of the relationships between various environmental factors and the microbiome composition. This project focuses on the relationship between diet, the way in which it influences the microbiome, and how this in turn influences life history traits in flies. While it is clear that the host genome and microbiome contribute to life history variation, it is not well understood how natural variation in the fly microbiota composition is achieved. Therefore, a long-term goal surrounding this project is to address which components of the environment affect the microbiome and how they do so. My short-term goal here is to focus on one aspect of the environment—diet—to further understand how microbiomes are shaped and altered. To accomplish this goal, I will rear flies on 22 different diets (12 vegetables and 8 fruits), and test how the resultant microbiomes influence life history traits. I hypothesize that diet will alter the microbiome and, as a result, alter life history traits in D. melanogaster. I further hypothesize that dietary control of microbiome development is influenced by the sugar content of these diets. Overall, this project focuses on characterizing a baseline of dietary impact on life history and microbiota composition.