Abstract
The microbial diversity and quantitative dynamics during the insect’s development stages constitute recently developed putative tools in forensic and medical studies. Meanwhile, little is known on the role of insects in spreading foodborne pathogenic bacteria and on the impact of these pathogens on the overall insects and feeding substrate microbiome composition. Here, we provide the first characterization of the bacterial communities harbored in adult and immature stages of Lucilia sericata, one of the first colonizers of decomposed human remains, in the presence of the foodborne pathogen Salmonella enterica using 16S rRNA Illumina sequencing and qPCR. The pathogen transmission from the wild adults to the second generation was observed, with a 101.25× quantitative increase. The microbial patterns from both insect and liver samples were not influenced by the artificial introduction of this pathogenic foodborne bacteria, being dominated by Firmicutes and Proteobacteria. Overall, our results provided a first detailed overview of the insect and decomposed substrate microbiome in the presence of a human pathogen, advancing the knowledge on the role of microbes as postmortem interval estimators and the transmission of pathogenic bacteria.
Highlights
The microbial diversity and quantitative dynamics during the insect’s development stages constitute recently developed putative tools in forensic and medical studies
Salmonella enterica was introduced in the experimental model to observe whether or not this foodborne pathogenic bacterium can cause changes in the general structure of the microbiome during L. sericata development, as well as in the inoculated substrate, and whether or not these quantitative and qualitative changes would affect a possible estimation of the insect development stage
Our study involving L. sericata and S. enterica helps to understand these interactions in the wild, and their forensic and medical repercussions, by providing data on the bacterial specificity for certain insect life stages that can be used to track their transfer in the colonized tissues
Summary
The microbial diversity and quantitative dynamics during the insect’s development stages constitute recently developed putative tools in forensic and medical studies. Forensic microbiology studies were initiated in search of microbial patterns useful for the PMI e stimation[23,24,25] These studies targeted the microbiome associated with the decomposition of human r emains[26,27], swine and mouse carcasses[28,29,30], different decayed organs[31,32], and different necrophagous insect species life s tages[11,33,34]. Investigations of both cultured and uncultured bacterial communities showed similar dynamics patterns in animal and h umans[27], revealing the importance of using animal models in this field. These studies focused either on the decomposed tissues necrobiome[22] or the insects m icrobiome[33]
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