Abstract
Animal predators can track prey using their keen sense of smell. The bacteriovorous nematode Caenorhabditis elegans employs sensitive olfactory sensory neurons that express vertebrate-like odor receptors to locate bacteria. C. elegans displays odor-related behaviors such as attraction, aversion and adaptation, but the ecological significance of these behaviors is not known. Using a combination of food microbiology and genetics, we elucidate a possible predator–prey relationship between C. elegans and lactic acid bacteria (LAB) in rotting citrus fruit. LAB produces the volatile odor diacetyl as an oxidized by-product of fermentation in the presence of citrate. We show that C. elegans is attracted to LAB when grown on citrate media or Citrus medica L, commonly known as yuzu, a citrus fruit native to East Asia, and this attraction is mediated by the diacetyl odor receptor, ODR-10. We isolated a wild LAB strain and a wild C. elegans-related nematode from rotten yuzu, and demonstrate that the wild nematode was attracted to the diacetyl produced by LAB. These results not only identify an ecological function for a C. elegans olfactory behavior, but contribute to the growing understanding of ecological relationships between the microbial and metazoan worlds.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Se Wook Farms (Wonju), Chiaksan Peach Farms (Wonju) and Ja So Dahm Farms (Goheung) for allowing us to collect fruit samples, the Caenorhabditis Genetic Center for strains, Damien O’Halloran and Noelle L’Etoile for critical reading of the manuscript, and members of the Lee and Yoon labs. This work was supported by a Yonsei University Challenge Grant (2014-22-0152) and a New Investigator Grant from the Korea National Research Foundation (2015-51-0104).
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Choi, J., Yoon, Kh., Subbammal Kalichamy, S. et al. A natural odor attraction between lactic acid bacteria and the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. ISME J 10, 558–567 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2015.134
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2015.134
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