Dysbiosis is a strategy to control insect pests through disrupting symbiotic bacteria essential for their life cycle. The olive fly, Bactrocera oleae, has been considered a suitable system for dysbiosis, as the insect is strictly dependent on its uni...
Relationships between tephritids and microorganisms have been a focus of entomological research, particularly due to the potential use of microbial emissions in pest control. Symbiotic interactions between fruit flies and their associated gut bacteri...
Parasitoids are promising biocontrol agents of the devastating fruit fly, Bactrocera dorsalis. However, parasitoid performance is a function of several factors, including host-associated symbiotic bacteria. Providencia alcalifaciens, Citrobacter freu...
The interaction between insects and their gut microorganisms is an interesting and promising field of ecological and entomological research. The importance of microbionts in the life history traits of fruit flies has been well-studied in several teph...
Adult house flies frequent microbe-rich sites such as urban dumpsters and animal facilities, and encounter and ingest bacteria during feeding and reproductive activities. Due to unique nutritional and reproductive needs, male and female flies demonst...
Microbiota may alter a pathogen’s virulence potential at polymicrobial infection sites. Here, we developed a multi-modal Drosophila assay, amenable to the assessment of human bacterial interactions using fly survival or midgut regeneration as a...
The applied importance of symbiosis has been gaining recognition. The relevance of symbiosis has been increasing in agriculture, in developing sustainable practices, including pest management. Insect symbiotic microorganisms’ taxonomical and fu...
Blepharipa tibialis (Diptera: Tachinidae) is a typical parasitoid fly. It spends most of its lifespan inside its host (Antheraea pernyi larvae) and relies heavily on host nutrition for survival. Whether the gut bacteria characteristics of B. tibialis...
Gut microbes are known to play various roles in insects such as digestion of inaccessible nutrients, synthesis of deficient amino acids, and interaction with ecological environments, including host plants. Here, we analyzed the gut microbiome in Hess...
Endosymbiotic intracellular bacteria of the genus Wolbachia are harboured by many species of invertebrates. They display a wide range of developmental, metabolic and nutritional interactions with their hosts and may impact the transmission of arbovir...
Leishmaniasis is a vector-borne parasitic disease caused by Leishmania spp., transmitted to humans by phlebotomine sand flies. The development of Leishmania into infective metacyclic promastigotes occurs within the sand fly gut, where the bacterial m...
The nematode Heterorhabditis bacteriophora, its mutualistic bacterium Photorhabdus luminescens, and the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster establish a unique system to study the basis of infection in relation to host metabolism. Our previous results i...
The gut microbiota of Drosophila melanogaster offers a simplified yet powerful system to study conserved mechanisms of host–microbe interactions. Unlike the highly complex mammalian gut microbiota, which includes hundreds of species, the fly gu...
Various factors, including the insect host, diet, and surrounding ecosystem can shape the structure of the bacterial communities of insects. We have employed next generation, high-throughput sequencing of the 16S rRNA to characterize the bacteriome o...
The northern region of Brazil is endemic for American Tegumentary Leishmaniasis (ATL) primarily caused by Leishmania guyanensis and transmitted by the sand fly Nyssomyia umbratilis. The disease occurs at different rates in the municipalities of Manac...
Facultative intracellular symbionts like the α-proteobacteria Wolbachia influence their insect host phenotype but little is known about how much they affect their host microbiota. Here, we quantified the impact of Wolbachia infection on the bacterial...
The endosymbiotic Wolbachia bacteria frequently cause cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI) in their insect hosts, where Wolbachia-infected males cross with uninfected females, leading to no or fewer progenies, indicating a paternal modification by Wolbac...