The Drosophila transcriptional network is structured by microbiota

ABSTRACT: Resident microorganisms (microbiota) have far-reaching effects on the biology of their animal hosts, with major consequences for the host’s health and fitness. Some of these effects can be explained by microbial impacts on the expression of individual genes but a full understanding of microbiota-dependent gene regulation requires analysis of the overall architecture of the host transcriptome. In this study, we investigated the impact of the microbiota on the global structure of the transcriptome of Drosophila. Our transcriptomic analysis of 17 Drosophila lines representative of the global genetic diversity of this species yielded a total of 11 transcriptional modules of co-expressed genes. For 7 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, the network structure 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 tightens 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 key first evidence that the microbiota strengthens the co-expression of genesin specific networks of functionally-related transcripts relative to the animal’s intrinsic baseline level of co-expression. Our system-wide analysis demonstrates that the presence of microbiota enhances the structure of 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.

ORGANISM(S): Drosophila melanogaster

PROVIDER: GSE87818 | GEO | 2016/12/31

SECONDARY ACCESSION(S): PRJNA347655

REPOSITORIES: GEO