Ass. Prof. Dr. Dolma Michellod, NIBB

Dolma Michellod from the National Institute for Basic Biology, Japan, will give a talk:

Exploring symbiotic lipid metabolism using metabolite imaging

“While lipids are established key players in pathogenic interactions, their function and importance in beneficial bacterial-animal symbioses remain largely unexplored. These studies are challenged by the difficulty of cultivating symbiotic partners in isolation. However, recent technical advances in high-resolution metabolite imaging offer new avenues to characterize lipid composition at the host-microbe interface.
Here, we explored lipid distribution in the nutritional symbiosis between sap-feeding insects and their intracellular endosymbionts. Genomic evidence suggests lipids are essential to these associations, as drastic genome reduction and the loss of phospholipid synthesis pathways are common features in these endosymbionts. We investigated this integrated lipid metabolism using the pea aphid symbiosis as a model. Using multi-omics, we mapped the ability of both partners to synthesize, modify, and transfer phospholipids. We then combined state-of-the-art high-resolution metabolite imaging with fluorescence microscopy and LC-MS/MS to identify lipid species at the host-microbe interface and determine the impact of this cooperative lipid metabolism on the phospholipid profile of both partners. Our results indicate that, at the class level, the endosymbiont’s lipid profile closely resembles that of its eukaryotic host, supporting the hypothesis that the symbiont derives all its phospholipids from its host. At the species level, we identified a handful of lipids specific to the symbiotic tissues and others specifically associated with the endosymbiont, suggesting that the lipid transfer is non-random. This work represents a crucial step toward elucidating the cooperative lipid metabolism that supports sap-feeding insect symbioses.”

Hosts

Prof. Gruber-Vodicka & Prof. Liebeke