Presenter: Dante James − Multidisciplinary Science
Faculty Mentor(s): Nadia Singh
Session: (In-Person) Poster Presentation
Hot sauce adds spice to our life, orange juice gives us a refreshing break in the morning, and probiotics help us digest food. These components of our diets affect not only our mood, but our general health. We aimed to explore how components of our diet may affect the microbiome. Specifically, we wanted to test the relationship between diet and the bacteria strains found in microbiomes. To test this, we utilized the model organism Drosophila melanogaster. Our hypothesis was that different diets affect the microbiome of Drosophila melanogaster. We tested 4 separate treatments. These included a control, probiotics, hot sauce, and juice. We prepared fly food containing 20% (by volume) of each of these treatments. We exposed flies for one week and then homogenized them in water. We plated the homogenate on LB plates to culture bacteria for 3 days. We then counted the colonies that had formed and isolated them. We used PCR to amplify a segment of the 16S gene. Finally, we used the BLAST program to identify what bacteria we cultured. We found that the two most common genera across treatments were Staphylococcus and Acetobacter. We also found that the bacterial community changed in response to the different diets. This indicates that diet can affect the microbiome, which has implications and significance for human health.