Transplanting human infant gut microbiome species into Galleria mellonella.

Objective: Study of the human infant gut microbiome requires the use of surrogate mammalian species such as mice. We sought to investigate the usefulness of the greater wax moth larva, Galleria mellonella, as an alternative.

Results: We have analysed the native gut microbiome of Galleria and developed methods for clearing the native microbiome and introducing species from human infant faecal samples.

sp. nov., isolated from the wax moth .

Four bacterial strains were isolated from two different colony sources of the wax moth . They were characterized by a polyphasic approach including 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis, core-genome analysis, average nucleotide identity (ANI) analysis, digital DNA-DNA hybridization (dDDH), determination of G+C content, screening of antibiotic resistance genes, and various phenotypic analyses. Initial analysis of 16S rRNA gene sequence identities indicated that strain GAL7 was potentially very closely related to and , having 99.