Our new paper, led by undergraduate Amber Walters and in collaboration with Drs. Peter Newell, Angela Douglas, and Paul Schmidt, was published in Molecular Ecology.
![Figure3b_1.jpg](https://brightspotcdn.byu.edu/dims4/default/5557d73/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1953x911+0+0/resize/840x392!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbrigham-young-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fa8%2Fc0%2F8fc39a414c689c74a7dbd0d72abc%2Ffigure3b-1.jpg)
Four key findings from the paper are:
- The microbiota influences the life history traits of flies in correlated ways that are consistent with known patterns resulting from host genetic variation
- The microbiota varies consistently with host geography
- Host phenotypes vary with geography independent of the microbiota
- Flies originating from different geographies must manage their associated microbial communities in order to adopt their genetically-adapted life history strategy
Congratulations to other undergraduate co-authors: Rachel Hughes, Tanner Call, Carson Walker, Hailey Wilcox, Samara Peterson. Also a big thanks to Dr. Paul Evans, Dr. Duane Jeffries and the late Dr. James Farmer who collected or stored flies from southern Utah that we also studied in this paper.