The effect of microbiome on social spacing in Drosophila melanogaster depends on genetic background and sex

Abstract

The gut microbiome modulates many essential functions including metabolism, immunity, and behaviour. Specifically, within behaviour, social behaviours such as sociability, aggregation, mating preference, avoidance, oviposition, and aggression are known to be regulated in part by this host-microbiome relationship. Here, we show the microbiome's role in the determination of social spacing in a sex- and genotype-specific manner. Future work can be done on characterizing the microbiome in each of these fly strains to identify the species of microbes present as well as their abundance.

Figure 1. Social space of flies axenic or not, for 4 different strains

Canton-S (A-C), Elwood (D-E), BJS (G-I) and BJS treated with antibiotics (J-L). A, D, G, J: Social space measured as the average number of flies within 4 body length, +/- s.e.m., number of assays indicated in the columns, each with 12-17 flies of indicated sexes. B, E, H, K: Social space of the same assays measured as the distribution of distance to the closest neighbour, and C, F, I, L distribution of the distance to all neighbours, represented with box (median, and interquartile 25-75%) and whiskers (10-90%). Axenic treatments: light grey, non-axenic (control): dark grey; males: orange outline, females: purple outline. Details of statistical tests can be found in Tables 1 and 2 . Drawing created using BioRender.