Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Ellegaard, Kirsten M
• Engel, Philipp

Titel

Genomic diversity landscape of the honey bee gut microbiota

Ist Teil von

• Nature communications, 2019-01, Vol.10 (1), p.446-446, Article 446

Ort / Verlag

England: Nature Publishing Group

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Free E-Journal (出版社公開部分のみ）

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The structure and distribution of genomic diversity in natural microbial communities is largely unexplored. Here, we used shotgun metagenomics to assess the diversity of the honey bee gut microbiota, a community consisting of few bacterial phylotypes. Our results show that most phylotypes are composed of sequence-discrete populations, which co-exist in individual bees and show age-specific abundance profiles. In contrast, strains present within these sequence-discrete populations were found to segregate into individual bees. Consequently, despite a conserved phylotype composition, each honey bee harbors a distinct community at the functional level. While ecological differentiation seems to facilitate coexistence at higher taxonomic levels, our findings suggest that, at the level of strains, priority effects during community assembly result in individualized profiles, despite the social lifestyle of the host. Our study underscores the need to move beyond phylotype-level characterizations to understand the function of this community, and illustrates its potential for strain-level analysis.