Institut de Génomique Fonctionnelle de Lyon, Université de Lyon, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, Unité Mixte de Recherche 5242, Lyon, France.
PLoS Biol. 2018 Aug 2;16(8):e2006945. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.2006945. eCollection 2018 Aug.
In the animal kingdom, nutritional mutualism is a perpetual and intimate dialogue carried out between the host and its associated gut community members. This dialogue affects many aspects of the host's development and physiology. Some constituents of the animal gut microbiota can stably reside within the host for years, and such long-term persistence might be a prerequisite for these microbes to assert their beneficial impact. How long-term persistence is established and maintained is an interesting question, and several classic model organisms associated with cultivable resident strains are used to address this question. However, in Drosophila, this model has long eluded fly geneticists. In this issue of PLOS Biology, Pais and colleagues present the most rigorous and comprehensive demonstration to date that persistence and gut residency do take place in the digestive tract of Drosophila melanogaster. This natural gut isolate of Acetobacter thailandicus stably colonizes the adult fly foregut, accelerates larval maturation, and boosts host fecundity and fertility as efficiently as the known laboratory strains. The discovery of such stable association will be a boon for the Drosophila community interested in host-microbiota interaction, as it not only provides a novel model to unravel the molecular underpinnings of persistence but also opens a new arena for using Drosophila to study the implications of gut persistence in evolution and ecology.
在动物王国中，营养互惠是宿主与其相关肠道群落成员之间进行的一种持久而亲密的对话。这种对话影响宿主的许多发育和生理方面。动物肠道微生物群的一些成分可以在宿主体内稳定存在数年，这种长期的持久性可能是这些微生物发挥其有益影响的前提。长期持久性是如何建立和维持的，这是一个有趣的问题，几个与可培养定植菌相关的经典模式生物被用来解决这个问题。然而，在果蝇中，这个模型长期以来一直困扰着果蝇遗传学家。在本期《PLOS Biology》中，Pais 及其同事提供了迄今为止最严格和全面的证据，证明 Acetobacter thailandicus 的自然肠道分离株确实定植于黑腹果蝇的成虫前肠，加速幼虫成熟，并像已知的实验室菌株一样有效地提高宿主的繁殖力和生育能力。这种稳定关联的发现将是对热衷于研究宿主-微生物群相互作用的果蝇社区的一个福音，因为它不仅提供了一个新的模型来揭示持久性的分子基础，而且还为利用果蝇研究肠道持久性在进化和生态学中的意义开辟了新的领域。
