Publication Date:
2022-08-02
Description:
© The Author(s), 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Gomaa, F., Utter, D. R., Loo, W., Lahr, D. J. G., & Cavanaugh, C. M. Exploring the protist microbiome: the diversity of bacterial communities associated with Arcella spp. (Tubulina: Amoebozoa). European Journal of Protistology, 82, (2022): 125861, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejop.2021.125861.
Description:
Research on protist-bacteria interactions is increasingly relevant as these associations are now known to play important roles in ecosystem and human health. Free-living amoebae are abundant in all environments and are frequent hosts for bacterial endosymbionts including pathogenic bacteria. However, to date, only a small fraction of these symbionts have been identified, while the structure and composition of the total symbiotic bacterial communities still remains largely unknown. Here, we use the testate amoeba Arcella spp. as model organisms to investigate the specificity and diversity of Arcella-associated microbial communities. High-throughput amplicon sequencing from the V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene revealed high diversity in the bacterial communities associated with the wild Arcella spp. To investigate the specificity of the associated bacterial community with greater precision, we investigated the bacterial communities of two lab-cultured Arcella species, A. hemispherica and A. intermedia, grown in two different media types. Our results suggest that Arcella-bacteria associations are species-specific, and that the associated bacterial community of lab-cultured Arcella spp. remains distinct from that of the surrounding media. Further, each host Arcella species could be distinguished based on its bacterial composition. Our findings provide insight into the understanding of eukaryotic-bacterial symbiosis.
Description:
This project was funded by National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology to F. Gomaa, Grant Number: PRFB1611514. Support was provided to D.R.U. from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE1745303 to D.R.U and by Harvard University’s Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology program.
Keywords:
Arcella- associated microbiome
;
Intracellular bacterial diversity
;
Heterotrophic amoebae
;
Amoeba-resistant bacteria
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
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