Consequences of vertebrate microbiota ...

Consequences of vertebrate microbiota changes due to symbiotic associations with humans (2018-2020)

Investigator: Kreisinger Jakub
Number of Project: 18-17796Y
Agency: Czech Science Foundation
Duration: 01. 01. 2018 - 31. 12. 2020

Plethora of phenotype changes arise in vertebrates exposed to tight associations with humans due to intended or relaxed selection, phenotype plasticity and neutral population-genetic processes. Despite massive research on these changes, many related aspects are still understudied, one of them being changes in host gut microbiota. gut microbiota induces strong modulatory effects on host's phenotype traits. At the same time, host exposed to tight association with humans change rapidly its gut microbiota. Consequently, we propose that gut microbiota changes due to associations with humans induce variation in host phenotype traits. Surprisingly, however, experimental support for this hypothesis is lacking. We aim to understand gut microbiota and associated phenotype traits changes in wild vs. lab house mouse. This sort of knowledge is important in the general context of experimental research on lab organisms, including house mouse. In particular, these gut microbiota and phenotype traits changes may have far-reaching effect on the interpretation of experimental results and may contribute to their limited reproducibility.