Production of germ-free mosquitoes via transient colonisation allows stage-specific investigation of host–microbiota interactions

Ottavia Romoli (), Johan Claes Schönbeck, Siegfried Hapfelmeier and Mathilde Gendrin ()
Additional contact information
Ottavia Romoli: Microbiota of Insect Vectors Group, Institut Pasteur de la Guyane
Johan Claes Schönbeck: Microbiota of Insect Vectors Group, Institut Pasteur de la Guyane
Siegfried Hapfelmeier: University of Bern
Mathilde Gendrin: Microbiota of Insect Vectors Group, Institut Pasteur de la Guyane

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-16

Abstract: Abstract The mosquito microbiota impacts the physiology of its host and is essential for normal larval development, thereby influencing transmission of vector-borne pathogens. Germ-free mosquitoes generated with current methods show larval stunting and developmental deficits. Therefore, functional studies of the mosquito microbiota have so far mostly been limited to antibiotic treatments of emerging adults. In this study, we introduce a method to produce germ-free Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. It is based on reversible colonisation with bacteria genetically modified to allow complete decolonisation at any developmental stage. We show that, unlike germ-free mosquitoes previously produced using sterile diets, reversibly colonised mosquitoes show no developmental retardation and reach the same size as control adults. This allows us to uncouple the study of the microbiota in larvae and adults. In adults, we detect no impact of bacterial colonisation on mosquito fecundity or longevity. In larvae, data from our transcriptome analysis and diet supplementation experiments following decolonisation suggest that bacteria support larval development by contributing to folate biosynthesis and by enhancing energy storage. Our study establishes a tool to study the microbiota in insects and deepens our knowledge on the metabolic contribution of bacteria to mosquito development.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21195-3 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:12:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-021-21195-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-21195-3

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().