Tanner Dabbert / Biology / Faculty Mentor: Alison Ravenscraft
Insects and plants have coevolved over millions of years, with herbivorous insects having evolved the ability to strongly resist and metabolize evolved plant defensive toxins through detoxification, bypassing the defenses to consume plant leaf material. Previous research has linked insect-associated gut bacteria as a participant in this detoxification process and are primary research targets as potential toxin degraders utilized by herbivorous insects. In this project, we hypothesized that three herbivorous insects that all consume plant species with different plant toxins, such as leaf beetles, caterpillars, and grasshoppers, would harbor distinct gut bacterial communities with divergent detoxification potentials. Using amplicon and Sanger sequencing, we found drastic variations in the insects’ gut community composition of each respective insect species. Bacteria species from Weissella, Pantoea, Enterobacter, and Pseudomonas genera were successfully isolated from the gut of these insects, and were identified and cultured in vitro. These findings provide valuable data on the gut bacterial community composition of economically relevant pests that affect crop production, as well as giving data on species that can be evaluated as potential toxin degraders, through in vitro toxin assays, and vivo re-inoculation mortality and weight observance experiments.
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