Dimensions: Animal-microbial interactions as an engine of phyletic and functional diversity: insights from interactions between drosophilids and their resident microbiota

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The cooperative relations between animals and their symbiotic bacteria make a crucial contribution to global diversity, but there remains a major gap in our understanding of how the taxonomic diversity (number of species etc.) relates to its functional diversity (what organisms do). In this project, genetic measures of diversity will be applied to quantify the taxonomic and functional diversity of bacterial communities in fruit flies and their relatives. A century's worth of genetic research on fruit flies makes these species a particularly amenable study system. This project will use several fly species, including an emerging agricultural pest that feeds on fruit and mushrooms, to investigate how taxonomy and function of the bacteria are coupled both to each other and to the functional diversity of the flies. The impact of these interactions on the capacity of the flies to utilize and damage fruits, their competitive interactions, and their resistance to parasites, will also be investigated. The research will also use genomic methods to obtain an integrated understanding of how animal-bacterial interactions shape the taxonomic and functional diversity of both the animal and its microbiota.This project will provide research education in biodiversity science for two postdoctoral associates and graduate and undergraduate students, and will be communicated to the general public by Science Saturday meetings, including talks and hands-on demonstrations, at the Rochester Museum and Science Center. A photographic exhibition communicating the beauty, complexity and diversity of animal-microbial associations will be organized at Cornell University for the general public. Both these complementary initiatives have plans for traveling exhibitions, for wider dissemination of the importance of biodiversity. The insects studied in this project include an invasive pest, the spotted-wing drosophila. The researchers will enhance ongoing extension activity via meetings, newsletter articles, and interviews with local media to describe how the findings of this research may help to mitigate the damage of this insect to crop production and food quality.