Animals selectively acquire specific symbiotic gut bacteria from their environments. We used live imaging of individual symbiotic bacterial cells colonizing the gut of living Drosophila melanogaster to show that they recognize a distinct physical niche in the gut using an adhesion system that we find is widely conserved.
A conserved bacterial genetic basis for commensal-host specificity
William Ludington
and Karina Gutierrez-Garcia, Kevin Aumiller, Ren Dodge, Benjamin Obadia, Ann Deng, Sneha Agrawal, Xincheng Yuan, Richard Wolff, Haolong Zhu, Ru-ching Hsia, Nandita Garud |
Science, 2024