天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被探索。两种密切相关的蜜蜂的胆量,Apiscerana和A.mellifera,由宿主特异性菌株组成的一组类似的核心细菌物种定植,从而为物种内多样性研究提供了良好的模型。
我们旨在评估A.cerana和A.mellifera肠道微生物群的种内多样性的功能相关性。
蜜蜂工人来自中国四个地区。他们的肠道微生物组通过鸟枪宏基因组测序进行了研究,并在物种水平上比较了细菌组成。进行了跨物种定植测定,通过LC-MS/MS表征肠道代谢组
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独特的功能概况。然而,A.cerana和A.mellifera肠道微生物组的总体功能概况相似;蜜蜂肠道代谢组的一致性进一步支持了这一点,因为不同蜜蜂物种的肠道微生物群在跨物种定植测定中显示出相当相似的代谢谱。此外,该实验还表明,A.cerana和A.mellifera的肠道微生物群可以在两种蜜蜂物种之间交叉定植。
我们的发现揭示了大多数核心肠道细菌在A.cerana和A.mellifera肠道之间的功能差异,这可能与它们的物种间多样性有关。然而,两种蜜蜂物种之间的整体肠道微生物群的功能分布趋同,可能是由于这两个物种的生态位重叠。我们的研究结果为蜜蜂共生微生物群的进化和功能作用提供了重要的见解,并揭示了功能冗余可以稳定肠道群落中菌株水平的基因含量多样性。
The functional relevance of intra-species diversity in natural microbial communities remains largely unexplored. The guts of two closely related honey bee species, Apis cerana and A. mellifera, 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 A. cerana and A. mellifera 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 A. cerana and A. mellifera 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 A. cerana and A. mellifera could cross colonise between the two honey bee species.
Our findings revealed functional differences in most core gut bacteria between the guts of A. cerana and A. mellifera, 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.