Department of Science and Education, Field Museum of Natural History, Integrative Research Center, 1400?S. Lake Shore Dr., Chicago, IL 60605, USA.
Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Princeton University, Washington Road, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
Integr Comp Biol. 2017 Oct 1;57(4):682-689. doi: 10.1093/icb/icx037.
Identifying the factors that structure host-associated microbiota is critical to understand the role these microbes may play in host ecology and evolutionary history. To begin to address this question we investigate the diversity and persistence of the bacterial community of the giant Neotropical bullet ant, Paraponera clavata. We included samples from four widely dispersed locations to address the role geography plays in shaping these communities. To understand how the digestive tract can filter bacterial communities, we sampled mouth and gut communities. To investigate the stability of community members we sampled wild caught and individuals kept on a sterile diet. Only a single bacterial taxon in the Firmicutes is consistently present across individuals, indicating a remarkably simple "core" bacterial community for the giant Neotropical bullet ant. Geography did not explain host bacterial diversity, but we did find significant reductions in diversity between the mouth and the gut tract. Lastly, our diet manipulations highlight the importance of controlled experiments to tease apart persistent microbial communities from environmental transients.
确定宿主相关微生物组的结构因素对于理解这些微生物在宿主生态学和进化历史中可能扮演的角色至关重要。为了开始解决这个问题，我们研究了巨拟叶螽（Paraponera clavata）的细菌群落的多样性和持久性。我们从四个分布广泛的地点采集样本，以探讨地理因素在塑造这些群落中的作用。为了了解消化道如何过滤细菌群落，我们采集了口腔和肠道群落的样本。为了研究群落成员的稳定性，我们采集了野外捕获的个体和在无菌饮食下饲养的个体的样本。仅有一个厚壁菌门的细菌分类群在个体间始终存在，这表明巨拟叶螽拥有一个非常简单的“核心”细菌群落。地理因素并不能解释宿主细菌的多样性，但我们确实发现口腔和肠道之间的多样性有显著降低。最后，我们的饮食处理强调了控制实验的重要性，以便从环境瞬变中分离出持久的微生物群落。
