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Video Q&A ViewAttendees 1

Medical, Urban, and Veterinary Entomology

10-Minute Paper

MUVE: Mosquito and Other Fly Vectors Ecology and Behavior On-Demand Presentations

Patterns of immune effector gene expression across house fly life history gives insight into their ability to flourish in filth

On-Demand
On-Demand

House flies (Musca domestica) develop and feed upon substrates teeming with diverse and abundant microbial communities. Flies have evolved unique strategies for flourishing in these microbe-rich environments, including massive duplications of genes coding for immune effectors such as antimicrobial peptides (AMPs). AMPs have canonical functions as innate immune defense molecules, protecting organisms from external microbial assaults. Since house flies need to defend themselves from microbes in their septic environment as well as ingest and utilize microbes as food, we hypothesized that the massive duplications of these effector genes (e.g., paralogs) underlie a unique immune repertoire utilized by flies that can be elucidated through observations of gene expression across life history. House fly eggs, larval instars (L1-L3), pupae (3 stages), and adults were collected, and RNA was extracted for transcriptome construction and differential gene expression (DGE) analysis, particularly genes assigned to innate immune pathways and effectors. Stage-specific immune effector expression was observed, and repertoires involved utilization of different effector types and paralogous genes. These results give insight into house fly utilization of AMPs not only as defense mechanisms but also their potential co-option for digestion of microbes in the developmental substrate. Both processes underlie the house fly’s successful exploitation of their septic habitat and can be targeted for fly control or explored as novel alternatives to antimicrobials.