Meeting Abstract
Understanding the role of the microbiota in determining animals’ physiological phenotypes remains a grand challenge in organismal biology. Although yeasts are a key component of the insect gut microbiota, the role of yeasts has often been overlooked in favor of the readily-sequenced bacteria. Here we describe an experimental system of Drosophila melanogaster and an associated gut yeast, Lachancea kluyveri. We show that colonization of the gut by yeast reduces chill-coma recovery time (an important proxy for thermal tolerance in insects), and that the yeast has to be alive to elicit this phenotype. There is some evidence that yeast colonization determines inter-individual variation in chill coma recovery time. Together, these results imply that variation in insect cold tolerance (and likely other aspects of physiology) may be driven, at least in part, by the gut microbiota.
