Computational and Systems Biology Graduate Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA.
Biology Department, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 45 Water Street, Woods Hole, MA, 02543, USA.
ISME J. 2018 Sep;12(9):2103-2113. doi: 10.1038/s41396-018-0182-1. Epub 2018 Jun 6.
Copepods harbor diverse bacterial communities, which collectively carry out key biogeochemical transformations in the ocean. However, bulk copepod sampling averages over the variability in their associated bacterial communities, thereby limiting our understanding of the nature and specificity of copepod-bacteria associations. Here, we characterize the bacterial communities associated with nearly 200 individual Calanus finmarchicus copepods transitioning from active growth to diapause. We find that all individual copepods sampled share a small set of "core" operational taxonomic units (OTUs), a subset of which have also been found associated with other marine copepod species in different geographic locations. However, most OTUs are patchily distributed across individual copepods, thereby driving community differences across individuals. Among patchily distributed OTUs, we identified groups of OTUs correlated with common ecological drivers. For instance, a group of OTUs positively correlated with recent copepod feeding served to differentiate largely active growing copepods from those entering diapause. Together, our results underscore the power of individual-level sampling for understanding host-microbiome relationships.
桡足类动物体内携带着多样的细菌群落，这些群落共同在海洋中进行着关键的生物地球化学转化。然而，批量桡足类动物采样平均化了其相关细菌群落的变异性，从而限制了我们对桡足动物与细菌之间关联的性质和特异性的理解。在这里，我们对近 200 只正从活跃生长状态过渡到休眠状态的长腹镖水蚤的细菌群落进行了特征描述。我们发现，所有被采样的个体桡足类动物都共享一小部分“核心”操作分类单元（OTUs），其中一部分也与其他海洋桡足类动物在不同地理位置有关联。然而，大多数 OTUs 在个体桡足类动物中呈斑块状分布，从而导致个体间群落的差异。在斑块状分布的 OTUs 中，我们鉴定出了与常见生态驱动因素相关的 OTU 组。例如，与桡足类动物最近的摄食呈正相关的一组 OTUs 有助于将大量处于活跃生长状态的桡足类动物与进入休眠状态的桡足类动物区分开来。总的来说，我们的研究结果强调了个体水平采样在理解宿主-微生物组关系方面的强大功能。
