News
Great sampling experience in Seychelles!
April 28, 2023 arul jose
We did field sampling on three Seychelles Islands – Mahe, Praslin and Aride. It was a great experience to see and collect specialist Drosophila sechellia directly from its noni fruit host. Thanks to Prof. Cassandra Extavour and Dr. Suhrid Ghosh for the wonderful teamwork. Thanks to Seychelles Entomologist Dr. Pat Matyot, the UniSey research team Dr. Gerard Rocamora and Mr. Joseph for excellent arrangements and field guidance.
Adaptive expansion and contraction of the gut microbiome
January 28, 2023 arul jose
Our work investigated maternal and host effects on microbiome during ontogeny in a holometabolous, polyphagous insect is now published in Functional Ecology. Thanks to the Hebrew and the Planning and Budgeting Committee (Council for Higher Education, Israel) for the postdoctoral fellowship award. This work was done in the labs of Profs. Boaz Yuval and Eduard Jurkevitch, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
As Mediterranean fruit fly, or “medfly” can succeed in many different fruits, we wanted to find out how the community of bacteria changes during the medflies development in different fruit. In particular, we attempted to tease apart the effects of the mother fly and the host fruit on the composition of the bacterial community. Accordingly, we performed a multigenerational experiment whereby we qualified the bacterial community in progeny of individual females—developing in different fruit species—over three generations. That’s a lot of bacteria! We found that the diversity of the bacterial community of larvae (within fruit) is significantly higher than the diversity found in adult females. Thus, there is a constant expansion (larvae) and contraction (adult) of the bacterial community across generations.
Shifting microbiome of Philornis downsi
February 16, 2021 arul jose Edit
Our work on Philornis gut microbiome is published in Environmental Microbiology. It is part of my postdoctoral works with the great Professors, Boaz Yuval and Eduard Jurkevitch, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI). It was also a collaboration with nice people Michael Ben-Yosef, Paola Lahuatte, Charlotte E. Causton, and Prof. George E. Heimpel. Thanks to the HUJI and the Planning and Budgeting Committee (Council for Higher Education, Israel) for the postdoctoral fellowship award.
We investigated the effects of domestication on the gut microbiome larvae and adults of the muscid fly Philornis downsi. This fly is an invasive nest parasite (larvae are blood-feeding parasites of nestlings) that exerts significant mortality on land birds in the Galapagos archipelago. This fly is a candidate for control by means of the Sterile Insect Technique, but this depends on successful mass rearing in captivity, which to date has not succeeded. By comparing the intrinsic effects of the life cycle to extrinsic effects imposed by environmental and diet disruptions, we examine the hypothesis that domestication precipitates an altered microbial community in laboratory-reared P. downsi. Our results show that P. downsi microbiomes are dynamic and shift correspondingly with life cycle and diet. Significantly, artificial diets provided in captivity disrupt the native microbiome and may affect larval development and adult reproduction.