Global Disease Biology, University of California, Davis, Davis, California, USA.
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Idahogrid.266456.5, Moscow, Idaho, USA.
mSystems. 2022 Apr 26;7(2):e0119521. doi: 10.1128/msystems.01195-21. Epub 2022 Mar 28.
The microbial communities in animal digestive systems are critical for host development and health. They stimulate the immune system during development, synthesize important chemical compounds like hormones, aid in digestion, competitively exclude pathogens, etc. Compared to the bacterial and fungal components of the microbiome, we know little about the temporal and spatial dynamics of bacteriophage communities in animal digestive systems. Recently, the bacteriophages of the honey bee gut were characterized in two European bee populations. Most of the bacteriophages described in these two reports were novel, harbored many metabolic genes in their genomes, and had a community structure that suggests coevolution with their bacterial hosts. To describe the conservation of bacteriophages in bees and begin to understand their role in the bee microbiome, we sequenced the virome of Apis mellifera from Austin, TX, and compared bacteriophage compositions among three locations around the world. We found that most bacteriophages from Austin are novel, sharing no sequence similarity with anything in public repositories. However, many bacteriophages are shared among the three bee viromes, indicating specialization of bacteriophages in the bee gut. Our study, along with the two previous bee virome studies, shows that the bee gut bacteriophage community is simple compared to that of many animals, consisting of several hundred types of bacteriophages that primarily infect four of the dominant bacterial phylotypes in the bee gut. Viruses that infect bacteria (bacteriophages) are abundant in the microbial communities that live on and in plants and animals. However, our knowledge of the structure, dynamics, and function of these viral communities lags far behind our knowledge of their bacterial hosts. We sequenced the first bacteriophage community of honey bees from the United States and compared the U.S. honey bee bacteriophage community to those of samples from Europe. Our work is an important characterization of an economically critical insect species and shows how bacteriophage communities can contain highly conserved individuals and be highly variable in composition across a wide geographic range.
动物消化系统中的微生物群落对宿主的发育和健康至关重要。它们在发育过程中刺激免疫系统，合成重要的化学物质，如激素，帮助消化，竞争性地排斥病原体等。与微生物组中的细菌和真菌成分相比，我们对动物消化系统中噬菌体群落的时间和空间动态知之甚少。最近，对欧洲两个蜜蜂种群的蜜蜂肠道噬菌体进行了描述。在这两个报告中描述的大多数噬菌体都是新的，它们的基因组中含有许多代谢基因，并且其群落结构表明与细菌宿主共同进化。为了描述噬菌体在蜜蜂中的保守性，并开始了解它们在蜜蜂微生物组中的作用，我们对来自德克萨斯州奥斯汀的蜜蜂肠道病毒组进行了测序，并比较了全球三个地点的噬菌体组成。我们发现，奥斯汀的大多数噬菌体都是新的，与公共数据库中的任何序列都没有相似性。然而，三个蜜蜂病毒组中有许多噬菌体是共享的，这表明蜜蜂肠道中的噬菌体具有特异性。我们的研究与之前的两项蜜蜂病毒组研究一起表明，与许多动物相比，蜜蜂肠道噬菌体群落相对简单，由几百种主要感染蜜蜂肠道中四种优势细菌类群的噬菌体组成。
感染细菌的病毒（噬菌体）在生活在植物和动物上的微生物群落中大量存在。然而，我们对这些病毒群落的结构、动态和功能的了解远远落后于我们对其细菌宿主的了解。我们对美国蜜蜂的第一个噬菌体群落进行了测序，并将美国蜜蜂的噬菌体群落与来自欧洲的样本进行了比较。我们的工作是对一种具有重要经济意义的昆虫物种的重要特征描述，展示了噬菌体群落如何包含高度保守的个体，并且在广泛的地理范围内组成高度可变。
