Department of Biology, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC 29401, USA. Hollings Marine Laboratory, 331 Ft. Johnson Rd., Charleston, SC 29412, USA. J. Craig Venter Institute, 9704 Medical Center Dr., Rockville, MD 20850, USA. Center for Coastal Environmental Health and Biomolecular Research, NOAA National Ocean Service, 219 Fort Johnson Rd. Charleston, SC 29412, USA. Georgia Aquarium, 225 Baker St., NW, Atlanta, GA 30313, USA.
Environ Microbiol Rep. 2009 Dec;1(6):555-62. doi: 10.1111/j.1758-2229.2009.00080.x. Epub 2009 Oct 2.
Respiratory illness is thought to be most the common cause of death in both wild and captive populations of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus). The suspected pathogens that have been isolated from diseased animals have also been isolated from healthy individuals, suggesting they may be part of the normal flora. Our current understanding of the bacteria associated with the upper respiratory tract (URT) of bottlenose dolphins is based exclusively upon culture-based isolation and identification. Because < 1% of naturally occurring bacteria are culturable, a substantial fraction of the bacterial community associated with the dolphin URT remains to be described. The dolphin URT microbiota revealed by sequencing of bacterial 16S rDNA exhibits almost no overlap with the taxa indicated in culture-based studies. The most abundant sequences in our libraries were similar among all of our study animals and shared the greatest homology to sequences of bacteria belonging to the genera Cardiobacterium, Suttonella, Psychrobacter, Tenacibaculum, Fluviicola and Flavobacterium; however, they were sufficiently different from database sequences from both cultured and uncultured organisms to suggest they represent novel genera and species. Our findings also demonstrate the dominance of three of the four bacterial phyla that dominate other mammalian microbiomes, including those of humans, and show tremendous diversity at the species/strain level, suggesting tight coevolution of the dolphin host and its URT bacterial community.
呼吸道疾病被认为是造成野生和圈养宽吻海豚（Tursiops truncatus）种群死亡的最常见原因。从患病动物中分离出的可疑病原体也从健康个体中分离出来，这表明它们可能是正常菌群的一部分。我们目前对宽吻海豚上呼吸道（URT）相关细菌的了解仅基于基于培养的分离和鉴定。因为只有<1%的自然发生的细菌可培养，与海豚 URT 相关的细菌群落的很大一部分仍有待描述。通过对细菌 16S rDNA 进行测序揭示的海豚 URT 微生物群与基于培养的研究中指示的分类群几乎没有重叠。我们文库中最丰富的序列在我们所有的研究动物中都相似，与属于 Cardiobacterium、Suttonella、Psychrobacter、Tenacibaculum、Fluiicola 和 Flavobacterium 属的细菌序列具有最大同源性；然而，它们与来自培养和未培养生物的数据库序列有足够的差异，表明它们代表新的属和种。我们的研究结果还表明，在包括人类在内的其他哺乳动物微生物组中占主导地位的四个细菌门中的三个在海豚中占主导地位，并且在物种/菌株水平上表现出巨大的多样性，这表明海豚宿主与其 URT 细菌群落之间存在紧密的共同进化。
