Allonsius, Camille

De Boeck, Ilke

Lebeer, Sarah

Van Beeck, Wannes

Wittouck, Stijn

Abstract: Background The popularity of Galleria mellonella as invertebrate model is increasing rapidly, because it forms an attractive alternative to study bacterial, fungal and viral infections, toxin biology, and to screen antimicrobial drugs. For a number of vertebrate and invertebrate animal and plant models, it has been established that the commensals present within the microbial communities on various host surfaces will influence the host\u2019s immune and growth development state and the colonization capacity of newly introduced micro-organisms. The microbial communities of Galleria mellonella larvae have, however, not yet been well characterized. Results In this study, we present the bacterial communities that were found by 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing on different body sites of G. mellonella larvae. These communities showed very little diversity and were mostly dominated by one Enterococcus taxon. In addition, we found that the production conditions (as \u2018bait\u2019 for fishing or under more controlled \u2018research grade\u2019 conditions - with or without hormones and antibiotics) appear to have little impact on the microbiota of the larvae. Conclusions Establishment of the simplicity of the microbiota of G. mellonella larvae underlines the potential of the larvae as a model host system for microbiome-host interactions

The microbiome of the invertebrate model host Galleria mellonella is dominated by Enterococcus

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Institutional Repository Universiteit Antwerpen