Damien Sparks
Groups STEM Summer Research Program
Major: Biology
Mentor: Joshua Jones
The utilization of acquired resources is of major importance to an organism’s development and research has shown that organisms can be heavily dependent on microbes for breaking down and supplementing tough to digest, nutrient poor resources. Onthophagus dung beetles have been shown to be one such system as they depend on cellulose rich and nutrient poor ruminant dung for food and have been shown to have decreased developmental outcomes when separated from their inherited microbiome. They can therefore be used as a system to ask questions about how hosts use microbes to utilize resources and assist in development. In this experiment we isolated microbes from the larval stage of Onthophagus taurus and tested their potential to metabolize carbon sources associated with dung. We found that the isolated microbes could metabolize a number of these carbon sources. This opens the door for future research to find the importance of these relevant microbes.
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