Insect gut metagenome Raw sequence reads

Gut microbiota can affect tephritid fruit fly (Diptera: Tephritidae) development, physiology, behaviour, and thus the quality of flies used for the sterile insect technique (SIT) as a pest management strategy. The Queensland fruit fly, Bactrocera tryoni (Froggatt), is a significant horticultural pest in Australia that can be managed with SIT. Little is known about the impacts that laboratory-adaptation (domestication) and mass-rearing have on the tephritid larval gut microbiome. Read lengths of previous fruit fly next-generation sequencing (NGS) studies have limited the resolution of microbiome studies. We used a new near full-length (>1300 bp) 16S rRNA gene amplicon NGS approach to characterize gut bacterial communities of individual B. tryoni larvae from two field populations (developing in peaches) and three domesticated populations (mass-reared on artificial diets).