title: Identifying the core microbial community in the gut of fungus-growing termites.
abstract: Gut microbes play a crucial role in decomposing lignocellulose to fuel termite societies, with protists in the lower termites and prokaryotes in the higher termites providing these services. However, a single basal subfamily of the higher termites, the Macrotermitinae, also domesticated a plant biomass-degrading fungus (Termitomyces), and how this symbiont acquisition has affected the fungus-growing termite gut microbiota has remained unclear. The objective of our study was to compare the intestinal bacterial communities of five genera (nine species) of fungus-growing termites to establish whether or not an ancestral core microbiota has been maintained and characterizes extant lineages. Using 454-pyrosequencing of the 16S rRNA gene, we show that gut communities have representatives of 26 bacterial phyla and are dominated by Firmicutes, Bacteroidetes, Spirochaetes, Proteobacteria and Synergistetes. A set of 42 genus-level taxa was present in all termite species and accounted for 56-68% of the species-specific reads. Gut communities of termites from the same genus were more similar than distantly related species, suggesting that phylogenetic ancestry matters, possibly in connection with specific termite genus-level ecological niches. Finally, we show that gut communities of fungus-growing termites are similar to cockroaches, both at the bacterial phylum level and in a comparison of the core Macrotermitinae taxa abundances with representative cockroach, lower termite and higher nonfungus-growing termites. These results suggest that the obligate association with Termitomyces has forced the bacterial gut communities of the fungus-growing termites towards a relatively uniform composition with higher similarity to their omnivorous relatives than to more closely related termites.
authors: Section for Ecology and Evolution, Department of Biology, Centre for Social Evolution, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.
authors: Saria
authors: S
authors: Otani
authors: Aram
authors: A
authors: Mikaelyan
authors: Tânia
authors: T
authors: Nobre
authors: Lars H
authors: LH
authors: Hansen
authors: N'Golo A
authors: NA
authors: Koné
authors: Søren J
authors: SJ
authors: Sørensen
authors: Duur K
authors: DK
authors: Aanen
authors: Jacobus J
authors: JJ
authors: Boomsma
authors: Andreas
authors: A
authors: Brune
authors: Michael
authors: M
authors: Poulsen
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001419:Bacteria / Q000145:classification* / Q000235:genetics; D004269:DNA, Bacterial / Q000235:genetics; D004064:Digestive System / Q000382:microbiology*; D020049:Isoptera / Q000382:microbiology*; D010802:Phylogeny; D012336:RNA, Ribosomal, 16S / Q000235:genetics; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA; D013045:Species Specificity; D013559:Symbiosis
chemical_list: D004269:DNA, Bacterial; D012336:RNA, Ribosomal, 16S
keywords: 16S rRNA pyrosequencing; Macrotermitinae; Termitomyces; bacterial community; gut microbiota; symbiosis