Woohoo. My first paper is out. It's work done at @BLiSC_India at @DeepaAgashe 's lab, with funding from @India_Alliance. A 1 s summary:

1234; we like microbes in our home. 5678; in new places, we don’t care.

Read on for a slightly longer one(a thread) :

Both the diet and environment can determine host microbiomes. What happens to the bacteria when the diet/environment changes?
Generalist hosts are good models to study the microbiome across such dietary/environmental shifts.
Enter the red flour beetles

Ok. Not those beatles. But hey, our beetles are pretty cool too. life stages eat and live in the same flour, making their food also their habitat. As expected, we find that they also share similar microbes. More interesting? The beetle microbiome does change quickly in a new diet

We also find that beetle fitness drops when we remove flour microbes; but this happens only in wheat, the ancestral diet. In new habitats, fitness doesn’t depend on microbes. What!?

So, beetles in microbe-free wheat flour behave like they are in unfamiliar territory. E.g., beetles cannibalise more eggs in microbe-depleted wheat, a typical behaviour in poor quality flours.

6.Does this mean beetles are somehow using the bacteria to assess the quality of their diet, or environment? We don’t know yet.

For now, we propose that flour beetles are a good model to study host-microbe interactions. Go read the paper here; I promise there’s a lot more fun info to find out! https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0239051

Thanks for reading. Do reach out if you have any comments/questions/suggestions.

Also, Special thanks to @amrutarajarajan, @riddhi_deshmukh, @gaurav_agavekar, Soumya panyam and Arun prakash.. interns and jrfs from the lab, for help with a lot of pilot/unfamiliar to me experiments for this work over the years