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.

Details

Title
The microbiomes of blowflies and houseflies as bacterial transmission reservoirs
Author
Junqueira, Ana Carolina M 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Aakrosh Ratan 2 ; Acerbi, Enzo 3 ; Drautz-Moses, Daniela I 3 ; Balakrishnan N V Premkrishnan 3 ; Costea, Paul I 4   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Linz, Bodo 5 ; Purbojati, Rikky W 3 ; Paulo, Daniel F 6 ; Gaultier, Nicolas E 3 ; Subramanian, Poorani 7 ; Hasan, Nur A 8 ; Colwell, Rita R 9 ; Bork, Peer 4 ; Azeredo-Espin, Ana Maria L 6 ; Bryant, Donald A 10 ; Schuster, Stephan C 3 

1  Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore; Departamento de Genética, Instituto de Biologia, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil 
2  Department of Public Health Sciences and Center for Public Health Genomics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA 
3  Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore 
4  European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Structural and Computational Biology Unit, Heidelberg, Germany 
5  Center for Vaccines and Immunology, College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA 
6  Centro de Biologia Molecular e Engenharia Genética, Departamento de Genética, Evolução e Bioagentes, Instituto de Biologia, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, SP, Brazil 
7  CosmosID Inc, Rockville, MD, USA 
8  CosmosID Inc, Rockville, MD, USA; Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, University of Maryland. Institute for Computational Biology, University of Maryland College Park, College Park, MD, USA 
9  CosmosID Inc, Rockville, MD, USA; Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, University of Maryland. Institute for Computational Biology, University of Maryland College Park, College Park, MD, USA; Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA 
10  Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore; Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA 
Pages
1-15
Publication year
2017
Publication date
Nov 2017
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
e-ISSN
20452322
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-16353-x
ProQuest document ID
1968049450
Copyright
© 2017. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.