19-BBSRC-NSF/BIO Bacterial and host genetic factors contributing to microbiome acquisition and homeostatis in mosquitoes

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Animals harbor gut microbial communities that are essential for their fitness. However, the mechanisms underlying how these communities assemble in the gut remain largely unexplored in most host systems. The proposed research builds on existing productive collaborations to expand our knowledge of how hosts control gut colonization by bacteria and, conversely, how bacteria adapt to the gut to form stable associations with hosts. To date, coevolution has almost exclusively been investigated in bacterial partners of highly stable, long-term associations such as obligate human pathogens or vertically transmitted obligate symbionts. Here, we hypothesize that host-microbiota coadaptation can also occur over repeated interactions spanning only very short time scales of the hosts' individual life span and islikely mediated by genetic factors of both hosts and bacteria. We will address our central hypothesis in the mosquito Aedes aegypti, an insect of interest because adult females can transmit Zika, dengue, and other arboviruses that cause severe disease in humans. Mosquitoes are an ideal system in which to test our hypothesis because they harbor simple gut communities containing bacterial taxa that can each be cultured and manipulated. Methods also exist to generate axenic (microbe-free) and gnotobiotic mosquitoes containing defined bacterial communities. Because both Ae. aegypti and its associated gut bacteria are genetically tractable, the proposed research provides a unique, in-depth mechanistic study of host-microbe gene interactions that are difficult to study in most systems.