Meeting Abstract
We know little about how microbiome community dynamics equate to microbial function, or how reciprocal interactions between hosts and their microbiome shift to regulate host phenotypic responses to environmental stress and disease. Furthermore, disease susceptibility often varies across ontogeny in animals, and periods of high vulnerability to infection during developmental windows can result in massive die-offs of wildlife. Emerging evidence suggests that gastrointestinal microbiota (GIM) play a central but poorly understood role in host phenotypic plasticity and shifting susceptibility to infections. In particular, GIMs may be central to developmental shifts in vulnerability to intestinal associated pathogens because GIMs undergo remodeling across ontogeny in many vertebrates, and these functional changes can have long-term consequences for adult phenotypes. This project used GIM engineering in larval amphibians, along with ranaviruses as a model developmental and disease system to test how the GIM community influence phenotypic development, physiological performance, and disease susceptibility across ontogeny in closely related species that vary in their resistance to infection. Using a gnotobiotic protocol we found that microbial communities can be manipulated by swapping GIMs between species that differ in developmental patterns and disease susceptibility. Furthermore, we found that altered GIMs influenced rates of amphibian growth, metabolism, development, fluctuating asymmetry patterns, and susceptibility to ranavirus infection. These results provide insight into how GIM composition influence host developmental plasticity, physiological performance, stress tolerance, and disease resistance.
