College of Animal Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, China.
J Adv Res. 2021 Aug 10;37:19-31. doi: 10.1016/j.jare.2021.08.002. eCollection 2022 Mar.
The functional relevance of intra-species diversity in natural microbial communities remains largely unexplored. The guts of two closely related honey bee species, and , are colonised by a similar set of core bacterial species composed of host-specific strains, thereby providing a good model for an intra-species diversity study.
We aim to assess the functional relevance of intra-species diversity of and gut microbiota.
Honey bee workers were collected from four regions of China. Their gut microbiomes were investigated by shotgun metagenomic sequencing, and the bacterial compositions were compared at the species level. A cross-species colonisation assay was conducted, with the gut metabolomes being characterised by LC-MS/MS.
Comparative analysis showed that the strain composition of the core bacterial species was host-specific. These core bacterial species presented distinctive functional profiles between the hosts. However, the overall functional profiles of the and gut microbiomes were similar; this was further supported by the consistency of the honey bees' gut metabolome, as the gut microbiota of different honey bee species showed rather similar metabolic profiles in the cross-species colonisation assay. Moreover, this experiment also demonstrated that the gut microbiota of and could cross colonise between the two honey bee species.
Our findings revealed functional differences in most core gut bacteria between the guts of and , which may be associated with their inter-species diversity. However, the functional profiles of the overall gut microbiomes between the two honey bee species converge, probably as a result of the overlapping ecological niches of the two species. Our findings provide critical insights into the evolution and functional roles of the mutualistic microbiota of honey bees and reveal that functional redundancy could stabilise the gene content diversity at the strain-level within the gut community.
在自然微生物群落中，种内多样性的功能相关性在很大程度上仍未得到探索。两种密切相关的蜜蜂物种（ 和 ）的肠道被一组相似的核心细菌物种所定植，这些核心细菌物种由宿主特异性菌株组成，因此为种内多样性研究提供了一个很好的模型。
我们旨在评估 和 肠道微生物群的种内多样性的功能相关性。
从中国的四个地区采集了蜜蜂工蜂。通过 shotgun 宏基因组测序对它们的肠道微生物组进行了调查，并在物种水平上比较了细菌组成。进行了跨物种定植实验，通过 LC-MS/MS 对肠道代谢组进行了表征。
比较分析表明，核心细菌物种的菌株组成是宿主特异性的。这些核心细菌物种在宿主之间呈现出独特的功能特征。然而， 和 的肠道微生物组的整体功能特征相似；这进一步得到了蜜蜂肠道代谢组一致性的支持，因为不同蜜蜂物种的肠道微生物组在跨物种定植实验中表现出相当相似的代谢特征。此外，该实验还表明 和 的肠道微生物组可以在两个蜜蜂物种之间交叉定植。
我们的研究结果揭示了 和 的肠道中大多数核心肠道细菌之间的功能差异，这可能与它们的种间多样性有关。然而，两个蜜蜂物种之间的整体肠道微生物组的功能特征趋于一致，这可能是由于两个物种的生态位重叠所致。我们的研究结果为蜜蜂共生微生物的进化和功能作用提供了重要的见解，并表明功能冗余可能稳定肠道群落中菌株水平的基因内容多样性。
