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MMP005: Fruitflies, microbes, and aggression with Jeremy Brownlie
Editors in Conversation
English - October 02, 2015 22:42 - 42 minutes - 29.4 MB - ★★★★ - 10 ratingsLife Sciences Science Health & Fitness Medicine asm for fox interviews jeff magazine microbe microbiology news science Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Jeremy Brownlie of Griffıth University in Brisbane, Australia, talks with Jeff Fox about how bacteria influence aggressive behavior in an animal. Fruit flies infected with the wMelPop strain of Wolbachia were less aggressive than their uninfected peers. The neurotransmitter octopamine regulates fruit fly aggression, and Brownlie and his collaborators found that the infected flies produce less of the compound than their uninfected peers, and expression of two genes that encode enzymes responsible for producing octopamine are present at lower levels in infected flies. “That suggested that Wolbachia directly affects fruit fly gene function,” he says.
This story was featured in the September 2015 issue of Microbe magazine.
Visit http://microbeworld.org/mmp for complete show notes.