Abstract
There is a lot of evidence indicating pioneer microbes in early life having various effects on later host biology. Because of the influential phylogenetic position of sea cucumber, which is a deep branching clade in Deuterostomia, the attention on the microbiome in sea cucumber has been increasing. Although microbes in sea cucumber have been reported in several studies, there is a lack of knowledge regarding the pioneer microbiota in the early life stages of sea cucumber. In this study, microbiota changes during the larval development of sea cucumber were assessed using a laboratory rearing system. Microbial community structure was likely to be related to the developmental stage and significant alterations were detected in the late auricularia stage. The relative abundances of Oceanospirillales, Alteromonadales, and Rhodobacterales significantly varied after gut formation. A total of 257 strains were isolated from larval developmental stages of sea cucumber and affiliated to 124 ASVs in the metagenomic analysis. This data demonstrates for the first-time dynamic changes of sea cucumber microbiota in the developmental stages in early life.
Highlights
Since the introduction of holobiont and hologenome concept, comprehensive studies on how holobiont assembly starts, in particular, which kinds of microorganisms first colonize when establishing the holobiont have been the subject of discussion
A total of 974,753 Meta16S sequence reads were obtained from sea cucumber and seawater samples collected from fertilized eggs (FE), gastrula (GL), early auricularia (EA), late auricularia (LA), pentactula (PT), and juveniles (JN) (Supplementary Table 1)
The 2D prinicipal coordinate analysis (PCoA) plot based on unweighted UniFrac analysis obtained sea cucumber larvae and rearing seawater samples at each developmental stage indicates that (1) microbiotas between seawater and sea cucumber were not grouped, (2) microbiota between FE, GL, and EA juveniles were grouped but FE, GL, and EA seawater microbiotas were not, and (3) microbiota between PT and JN sea cucumber larvae were grouped and LA, PT, and JN seawater microbiota were grouped (Figure 1)
Summary
Since the introduction of holobiont and hologenome concept, comprehensive studies on how holobiont assembly starts, in particular, which kinds of microorganisms first colonize when establishing the holobiont have been the subject of discussion. These first colonizers are called pioneer microbes, and have been widely studied in Deuterostomia animals with a view to investigating their composition and function in holobionts (Wopereis et al, 2014; Arrieta et al, 2015; Schokker et al, 2015; Gensollen et al, 2016). Many previous studies have suggested the importance of early life microbiota in host biology, the structure and function of pioneer microbiota in marine Deuterostomia invertebrate has not been fully elucidated yet
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