AUTHOR=De Cock Maarten , Virgilio Massimiliano , Vandamme Peter , Bourtzis Kostas , De Meyer Marc , Willems Anne TITLE=Comparative Microbiomics of Tephritid Frugivorous Pests (Diptera: Tephritidae) From the Field: A Tale of High Variability Across and Within Species JOURNAL=Frontiers in Microbiology VOLUME=11 YEAR=2020 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/microbiology/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2020.01890 DOI=10.3389/fmicb.2020.01890 ISSN=1664-302X ABSTRACT=
The family Tephritidae includes some of the most notorious insect pests of agricultural and horticultural crops in tropical and sub-tropical regions. Despite the interest in the study of their gut microbiome, our present knowledge is largely based on the analysis of laboratory strains. In this study, we present a first comparative analysis of the gut microbiome profiles of field populations of ten African and Mediterranean tephritid pests. For each species, third instar larvae were sampled from different locations and host fruits and compared using 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing and a multi-factorial sampling design. We observed considerable variation in gut microbiome diversity and composition both between and within fruit fly species. A “core” microbiome, shared across all targeted species, could only be identified at most at family level (Enterobacteriaceae). At genus level only a few bacterial genera (