With a little help from my friends: the roles of microbial symbionts in insect populations and communities.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
; 379(1904): 20230122, 2024 Jun 24.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-38705185
ABSTRACT
To understand insect abundance, distribution and dynamics, we need to understand the relevant drivers of their populations and communities. While microbial symbionts are known to strongly affect many aspects of insect biology, we lack data on their effects on populations or community processes, or on insects' evolutionary responses at different timescales. How these effects change as the anthropogenic effects on ecosystems intensify is an area of intense research. Recent developments in sequencing and bioinformatics permit cost-effective microbial diversity surveys, tracking symbiont transmission, and identification of functions across insect populations and multi-species communities. In this review, we explore how different functional categories of symbionts can influence insect life-history traits, how these effects could affect insect populations and their interactions with other species, and how they may affect processes and patterns at the level of entire communities. We argue that insect-associated microbes should be considered important drivers of insect response and adaptation to environmental challenges and opportunities. We also outline the emerging approaches for surveying and characterizing insect-associated microbiota at population and community scales. This article is part of the theme issue 'Towards a toolkit for global insect biodiversity monitoring'.
Key words
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Symbiosis
/
Microbiota
/
Insecta
Limits:
Animals
Language:
En
Journal:
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
Year:
2024
Document type:
Article
Affiliation country: