SIU ecologist to present on importance of gut microbiota for larval frogs, September 5 - News - Illinois State University News

seminar speaker Robin Warne holding a tree frog

Robin Warne (photo credit for tadpoles Robin Warne)

Robin Warne, Ph.D., a vertebrate physiological ecologist from the Department of Zoology at Southern Illinois University (SIU) at Carbondale, will present on the importance of gut microbiota for larval frogs. His seminar is scheduled for 4–5 p.m. Thursday, September 5, in 210 Moulton Hall as part of the School of Biological Sciences’ seminar series. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to attend.

Critical developmental windows can have profound effects on animal phenotypes, and exposure to varying factors during these periods influence the function and health of animals over lifetimes. Research in Warne’s lab at SIU explores the factors and determinants that shape critical developmental and disease windows in amphibians, including environmental stressors, neuroendocrine function, and gut microbiota.

This seminar will explore recent work demonstrating how hatching constitutes a critical window for establishment of a gut microbiome in larval frogs. Furthermore, variation in gut bacterial diversity during early larval stages determines long-term development, growth, and metabolic patterns, as well as influences susceptibility to pathogenic ranavirus infection—an emerging disease of ectothermic vertebrates. In amphibians, development rates and disease susceptibility are directly related, because allocation trade-offs between developmental physiology and immunity determine critical disease windows in larval amphibians. Specifically, late larval and metamorphic life stages constitute a critical disease window, when amphibians exhibit high vulnerability to ranavirus and other pathogens, however, rapid metamorphosis is an escape from ranavirus induced mortality.

Building upon these findings, we are developing and advancing approaches to modulate gut microbiomes and the metabolites they produce in order to affect target outcomes in wildlife and human physiology, health, and disease.



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