The Predicted Metabolic Function of the Gut Microbiota of Drosophila melanogaster

Abstract

An important goal for many nutrition-based microbiome studies is to identify the metabolic function of microbes in complex microbial communities and its impact on host physiology. This research can be confounded by poorly-understood effects of community composition and host diet on the metabolic traits of individual taxa. Here, we investigated these multi-way interactions by constructing and analyzing metabolic models comprising every combination of five bacterial members of the Drosophila gut microbiome (from single taxa to the five-member community of Acetobacter and Lactobacillus species) under three nutrient regimes. We show that the metabolic function of Drosophila gut bacteria is dynamic, influenced by community composition and responsive to dietary modulation. Furthermore, we show that ecological interactions such as competition and mutualism identified from the growth patterns of gut bacteria are underlain by a diversity of metabolic interactions, and show that the bacteria tend to compete for amino acids and B vitamins more frequently than for carbon sources. Our results reveal that in addition to fermentation products such as acetate, intermediates of the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle including 2-oxoglutarate and succinate are produced at high flux and cross-fed between bacterial taxa suggesting important roles for TCA cycle intermediates in modulating Drosophila gut microbe interactions and the potential to influence host traits. These metabolic models provide specific predictions of the patterns of ecological and metabolic interactions among gut bacteria under different nutrient regimes, with potentially important consequences for overall community metabolic function and nutritional interactions with the host. IMPORTANCEDrosophila is an important model for microbiome research partly because of the low complexity of its mostly culturable gut microbiota. Our current understanding of how Drosophila interacts with its gut microbes and how these interactions influence host traits derives almost entirely from empirical studies that focus on individual microbial taxa or classes of metabolites. These studies have failed to capture fully the complexity of metabolic interactions that occur between host and microbe. To overcome this limitation, we reconstructed and analyzed 31 metabolic models for every combination of the five principal bacterial taxa in the gut microbiome of Drosophila. This revealed that metabolic interactions between between Drosophila gut bacterial taxa are highly dynamic and influenced by co-occurring bacteria and nutrient availability. Our results generate testable hypothesis about among-microbe ecological interactions in the Drosophila gut and the diversity of metabolites available to influence host traits.