The microbiomes of blowflies and houseflies as bacterial transmission reservoirs
Open Access
- 24 November 2017
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in Scientific Reports
- Vol. 7 (1), 1-15
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-16353-x
Abstract
Blowflies and houseflies are mechanical vectors inhabiting synanthropic environments around the world. They feed and breed in fecal and decaying organic matter, but the microbiome they harbour and transport is largely uncharacterized. We sampled 116 individual houseflies and blowflies from varying habitats on three continents and subjected them to high-coverage, whole-genome shotgun sequencing. This allowed for genomic and metagenomic analyses of the host-associated microbiome at the species level. Both fly host species segregate based on principal coordinate analysis of their microbial communities, but they also show an overlapping core microbiome. Legs and wings displayed the largest microbial diversity and were shown to be an important route for microbial dispersion. The environmental sequencing approach presented here detected a stochastic distribution of human pathogens, such as Helicobacter pylori, thereby demonstrating the potential of flies as proxies for environmental and public health surveillance.This publication has 76 references indexed in Scilit:
- phyloseq: An R Package for Reproducible Interactive Analysis and Graphics of Microbiome Census DataPLOS ONE, 2013
- Cohabiting family members share microbiota with one another and with their dogseLife, 2013
- Pathogenicity of and plant immunity to soft rot pectobacteriaFrontiers in Plant Science, 2013
- Fast gapped-read alignment with Bowtie 2Nature Methods, 2012
- RAPSearch2: a fast and memory-efficient protein similarity search tool for next-generation sequencing dataBioinformatics, 2011
- Comparative pathology of bacteria in the genus Providencia to a natural host, Drosophila melanogasterMicrobes and Infection, 2011
- Circos: An information aesthetic for comparative genomicsGenome Research, 2009
- Fast and accurate short read alignment with Burrows–Wheeler transformBioinformatics, 2009
- Sequence analysis of a non-classified, non-occluded DNA virus that causes salivary gland hypertrophy of Musca domestica, MdSGHVVirology, 2008
- MEGAN analysis of metagenomic dataGenome Research, 2007