Dismissing-then-recruiting: a unique mechanism for symbiont recruitment and lignocellulose degradation in gut of black soldier fly larvae
Fang Ming Xiang, Xiao Tian Tang, María Gómez Brandón, Ahmed R. Henawy, ShuoYun Jiang, XinHua Xu, XueXin Chen, ZhiJian Zhang · 2026
Read Dismissing-then-recruiting: a unique mechanism for symbiont recruitment and lignocellulose degradation in gut of black soldier fly larvae by Fang Ming Xiang, Xiao Tian Tang, María Gómez Brandón, Ahmed R. Henawy, ShuoYun Jiang, XinHua Xu, XueXin Chen, ZhiJian Zhang (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13471303.txt.
Description
Xiang and an international team showed in 2026 how black soldier fly larvae staff their gut with microbes to digest tough plant waste they cannot break down alone. Larvae raised germ-free barely degraded the fiber at all, while larvae with gut microbes degraded about a third. The team mapped immune activity and sugar-coating genes along the gut, profiling microbe communities in each section.
The gut runs a dismissing-then-recruiting strategy: the front midgut bristles with antimicrobial weapons, a selective barrier killing most arrivals. The rear midgut lowers its immune guard and ramps up genes coating surfaces with sugars, a four-to-fivefold rise. Those sugars feed exactly the symbionts thriving there, microbes armed with fiber-cutting enzymes. The rear gut thus farms its workforce rather than tolerating it. The authors say the principle could improve industrial waste conversion with these larvae, already farmed for protein and waste processing.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Fang Ming Xiang, Xiao Tian Tang, María Gómez Brandón, Ahmed R. Henawy, ShuoYun Jiang, XinHua Xu, XueXin Chen, ZhiJian Zhang |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 68 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |