Microorganisms in Bees and Other Insects
Our research
Overview
The "Bugs in Bugs" stream is broadly interdisciplinary and develops skills relevant for a variety of careers in science. It is well suited for students interested in ecology, evolution, natural history, medicine, molecular biology, microbiology, and nutrition. Most research occurs in the lab using molecular and microbiological techniques, but students can undertake research based out doors working and collecting live insects specimens. Students can choose among projects related to their interests such as on the microbe abundance, diversity, and genomics, or insect diversity and behavior.
We encourage students to:
- be inquisitive and develop their own hypotheses
- work with each other to answer complex questions
- to make their data and other tools available to other researchers
Ecology
Ecology is the study of how organisms interact with other organisms and how they interact with their environment. We focus on how different environmental conditions and the biology of the host insect can influence what bacteria and yeast live in the guts of bees and wasps. Based on the host biology and environmental conditions we can make predictions about what kinds on bacteria and yeast live in their guts and how they help or harm their hosts.
Molecular Biology
Students use a variety of molecular techniques in this stream. PCR is a used to routinely to identify insects, bacteria, and yeast and work out how they are related to each other. Next generation sequencing is used to find out what communities of bacteria are living in insects, and also to sequence entire bacterial genomes. Bacterial genomes can reveal clues on the co-evolution of symbionts and their hosts.
Microbiology
We spend a lot of time growing organisms which live in the insects in culture. This is so we can isolate these bacterial and yeast species. From here we can work out what conditions the bacteria or yeast like to live in; how different species interact; describe new species; and get the complete DNA sequence for the organism to learn about their physiology and metabolism.
Collection
Local insects are collected in order for us to conduct our research. This is done over the year so students learn about their behavior, how to extract their DNA and bacteria, but also how to identify them. The stream has developed a collection of insects used for research, and these have been photographed to produce an image library available to the public.
