Engineering a symbiont as a biosensor for the honey bee gut environment

Abstract

The honey bee is a powerful model system to probe host-gut microbiota interactions, and an important pollinator species for natural ecosystems and for agriculture. While bacterial biosensors can provide critical insight into the complex interplay occurring between a host and its associated microbiota, the lack of methods to non-invasively sample the gut content, and the limited genetic tools to engineer symbionts, have so far hindered their development in honey bees. Here, we built a versatile molecular toolkit to genetically modify symbionts and report for the first time in the honey bee a technique to sample their feces. We reprogrammed the native bee gut bacterium Snodgrassella alvi as a biosensor for IPTG, with engineered cells that stably colonize the gut of honey bees and report in a dose-dependent manner exposure through the expression of a fluorescent protein. We showed that fluorescence readout can be measured in the gut tissues or non-invasively in the feces. These tools and techniques will enable rapid building of engineered bacteria to answer fundamental questions in host-gut microbiota research.