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.
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.