Journal article
Surveying the microbiome of ants: comparing 454 pyrosequencing with traditional methods to uncover bacterial diversity
Applied and environmental microbiology, v 79(2), pp 525-534
Jan 2013
PMID: 23124239
Featured in Collection : UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
Abstract
We are only beginning to understand the depth and breadth of microbial associations across the eukaryotic tree of life. Reliably assessing bacterial diversity is a key challenge, and next-generation sequencing approaches are facilitating this endeavor. In this study, we used 16S rRNA amplicon pyrosequencing to survey microbial diversity in ants. We compared 454 libraries with Sanger-sequenced clone libraries as well as cultivation of live bacteria. Pyrosequencing yielded 95,656 bacterial 16S rRNA reads from 19 samples derived from four colonies of one ant species. The most dominant bacterial orders in the microbiome of the turtle ant Cephalotes varians were Rhizobiales, Burkholderiales, Opitutales, Xanthomonadales, and Campylobacterales, as revealed through both 454 sequencing and cloning. Even after stringent quality filtering, pyrosequencing recovered 445 microbe operational taxonomic units (OTUs) not detected with traditional techniques. In comparing bacterial communities associated with specific tissues, we found that gut tissues had significantly higher diversity than nongut tissues, and many of the OTUs identified from these groups clustered within ant-specific lineages, indicating a deep coevolutionary history of Cephalotes ants and their associated microbes. These lineages likely function as nutritional symbionts. One of four ant colonies investigated was infected with a Spiroplasma sp. (order Entomoplasmatales), a potential ant pathogen. Our work shows that the microbiome associated with Cephalotes varians is dominated by a few dozen bacterial lineages and that 454 sequencing is a cost-efficient tool to screen ant symbiont diversity.
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Details
- Title
- Surveying the microbiome of ants: comparing 454 pyrosequencing with traditional methods to uncover bacterial diversity
- Creators
- Stefanie Kautz - Field Museum of Natural History, Department of Zoology, Chicago, Illinois, USA. skautz@fieldmuseum.orgBenjamin E R RubinJacob A RussellCorrie S Moreau
- Publication Details
- Applied and environmental microbiology, v 79(2), pp 525-534
- Publisher
- American Society for Microbiology (ASM); United States
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Biology
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:000312941800012
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-84871879563
- Other Identifier
- 991014877780304721
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- Collaboration types
- Domestic collaboration
- Web of Science research areas
- Biotechnology & Applied Microbiology
- Microbiology