UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

The Drosophila transcriptional network is structured by microbiota.

Dobson, AJ; Chaston, JM; Douglas, AE; (2016) The Drosophila transcriptional network is structured by microbiota. BMC Genomics , 17 , Article 975. 10.1186/s12864-016-3307-9. Green open access

[thumbnail of art%3A10.1186%2Fs12864-016-3307-9.pdf]
Preview
Text
art%3A10.1186%2Fs12864-016-3307-9.pdf - Published Version

Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Resident microorganisms (microbiota) have far-reaching effects on the biology of their animal hosts, with major consequences for the host's health and fitness. A full understanding of microbiota-dependent gene regulation requires analysis of the overall architecture of the host transcriptome, by identifying suites of genes that are expressed synchronously. In this study, we investigated the impact of the microbiota on gene coexpression in Drosophila. RESULTS: Our transcriptomic analysis, of 17 lines representative of the global genetic diversity of Drosophila, yielded a total of 11 transcriptional modules of co-expressed genes. For seven of these modules, the strength of the transcriptional network (defined as gene-gene coexpression) differed significantly between flies bearing a defined gut microbiota (gnotobiotic flies) and flies reared under microbiologically sterile conditions (axenic flies). Furthermore, gene coexpression was uniformly stronger in these microbiota-dependent modules than in both the microbiota-independent modules in gnotobiotic flies and all modules in axenic flies, indicating that the presence of the microbiota directs gene regulation in a subset of the transcriptome. The genes constituting the microbiota-dependent transcriptional modules include regulators of growth, metabolism and neurophysiology, previously implicated in mediating phenotypic effects of microbiota on Drosophila phenotype. Together these results provide the first evidence that the microbiota enhances the coexpression of specific and functionally-related genes relative to the animal's intrinsic baseline level of coexpression. CONCLUSIONS: Our system-wide analysis demonstrates that the presence of microbiota enhances gene coexpression, thereby structuring the transcriptional network in the animal host. This finding has potentially major implications for understanding of the mechanisms by which microbiota affect host health and fitness, and the ways in which hosts and their resident microbiota coevolve.

Type: Article
Title: The Drosophila transcriptional network is structured by microbiota.
Location: England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1186/s12864-016-3307-9
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12864-016-3307-9
Language: English
Additional information: © The Author(s). 2016 This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
Keywords: Coexpression, Drosophila, Gene regulation, Microbiota, Symbiosis, Transcriptional network
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1531047
Downloads since deposit
43Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item