Crop Bioprotection Research Unit, Agricultural Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1815 N. University St, Peoria, 61604, IL, USA.
Department of Entomology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 505 S. Goodwin Ave, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA.
Parasit Vectors. 2021 Jan 28;14(1):83. doi: 10.1186/s13071-021-04579-8.
The guts of blood-sucking insects host a community of bacteria that can shift dramatically in response to biotic and abiotic factors. Identifying the key factors structuring these microbial communities has important ecological and epidemiological implications.
We used the yellow fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti, to investigate the impact of mixed blood meals on gut microbiota of vector mosquitoes. Adult females were experimentally fed on sugar or blood from chicken, rabbit or a mixture of chicken and rabbit blood, and their gut microbiota were characterized using 16S rRNA gene amplification and MiSeq sequencing.
The gut bacterial communities of mosquitoes fed on the three blood meal treatments clustered separately, suggesting that host species identity and mixed blood-feeding are key determinants of gut bacterial community composition in mosquitoes. Mixed blood meal had a synergistic effect on both operational taxonomic unit (OTU) richness and the Shannon diversity index, suggesting that mixed blood-feeding can offset the nutritional deficit of blood meals from certain host species. The microbial communities observed in this study were distinct from those identified from similarly fed Ae. aegypti from our previous study.
These findings demonstrate that vector host-feeding preferences can influence gut microbial composition and diversity, which could potentially impact pathogen acquisition and transmission by the vector. The results also demonstrate that different microenvironmental conditions within the laboratory may play an important role in structuring the microbial communities of independently reared mosquito colonies.
吸血昆虫的肠道内栖息着一群细菌，这些细菌会对生物和非生物因素产生剧烈的变化。确定这些微生物群落的关键因素具有重要的生态和流行病学意义。
我们使用黄热病蚊子（Aedes aegypti）来研究混合血液饮食对病媒蚊子肠道微生物群的影响。成年雌性蚊子通过实验分别用糖或来自鸡、兔或鸡兔混合血液喂食，并使用 16S rRNA 基因扩增和 MiSeq 测序来描述它们的肠道微生物群。
喂食三种血液处理的蚊子的肠道细菌群落聚类分开，这表明宿主物种身份和混合吸血是蚊子肠道细菌群落组成的关键决定因素。混合血液喂养对操作分类单元（OTU）丰富度和香农多样性指数都有协同作用，这表明混合血液喂养可以抵消某些宿主物种血液饮食的营养不足。本研究中观察到的微生物群落与我们之前研究中从类似喂养的埃及伊蚊中鉴定出的群落不同。
这些发现表明，病媒宿主的摄食偏好会影响肠道微生物的组成和多样性，这可能会影响病原体通过病媒的获取和传播。研究结果还表明，实验室内部的不同微环境条件可能在独立饲养的蚊子群体的微生物群落结构中起着重要作用。
