Age-dependent gut microbiota dynamics and their association with male life-history traits in Drosophila melanogaster

Sultanova, Zahida, Dönertaş, Handan Melike, Hita, Alejandro, Aguilar, Prem, Dag, Berfin, Lucas-Lledo, José Ignacio, Latorre, Amparo and Carazo, Pau (2025) Age-dependent gut microbiota dynamics and their association with male life-history traits in Drosophila melanogaster. Microbial Ecology. ISSN 0095-3628

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Abstract

Growing evidence suggests that the gut microbiota is closely intertwined with life-history evolution in a wide range of species, including well-studied model organisms like Drosophila melanogaster. Although recent studies have explored the relationship between gut microbiota and female life-history, the link between gut microbiota and male life-history remains relatively unexplored. In this study, we investigated how gut microbiota changes with male age as well as the associations between gut microbiota composition and male life-history traits in D. melanogaster. Using 22 isolines from the Drosophila melanogaster Genetic Reference Panel (DGRP), we measured lifespan, early/late-life reproduction, and early/late-life physiological performance. We characterized the gut microbiota composition in young (5 days old) and old (26 days old) flies using 16S rDNA sequencing. We observed substantial variation in both male life-history traits and gut microbiota composition across isolines and age groups. Using machine learning, we show that gut microbiota composition could predict the chronological age of the organisms with high accuracy. The most important species contributing to machine learning prediction belonged to the Acetobacter and Ralstonia genera. Associations between gut microbiota and life-history traits were also notable, particularly involving different species from the Acetobacter genus. Our findings suggest that taxa such as Acetobacter may be relevant to the evolutionary ecology of host–microbe interactions in male fruit flies.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Data Availability: Raw sequencing data have been deposited in the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) at EMBL-EBI under accession number PRJEB88786. Life-history trait data is available in Supplementary Table 3. All processed data, including the data underlying each figure, is available in BioStudies with accession number S-BSST2029. Code availability: All code for preprocessing, statistical analysis, and visualization is available at https://github.com/mdonertas/DGRP_16S_MaleLH. The repository includes complete R scripts for all analyses, an renv.lock file for full reproducibility, and detailed documentation of all computational methods used in this study. Funding information: This study was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity grants: PGC2018-099344-B-I00 (AL), CGL2014-58722-P (PC and JILL), RYC-2013-12998 (PC), and RYC-2012-11872 (JILL). HMD is funded by Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung (P2021-00-007). PA was supported by FCT through a PhD grant (number 2021.05611). ZS was supported by the Atracció de Talent Fellowship and the Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship (ECF-2022-214).
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Biological Sciences
Related URLs:	https://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00248...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	01 Dec 2025 14:30
Last Modified:	05 Dec 2025 01:02
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/101168
DOI:	10.1007/s00248-025-02640-y

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