Common disease-discriminatory fungal taxa accurately diagnose shrimp white feces syndrome, black gills, and retardation diseases

Abstract

It is now recognized that the gut microbiota contributes indispensable roles in shrimp fitness. However, little is known about how the hepatopancreas counterpart affects shrimp health, though hepatopancreas is an important organ in shrimp immunity and digestion. Additionally, the ignorance of fungi arises the question whether the hepatopancreas fungal taxa are indicative of shrimp health status. To this end, we explored the structures of gut and hepatopancreas fungal communities between healthy and three different diseased (white feces syndrome (WFS), black gills (BG), and retarded growth (RG)) shrimp cohorts. There were no significant differences in the overall diversity and structures of fungal microbiota among healthy and the three diseased groups. However, we found disease specific-dependent changes in fungal lineages. For example, compared with the gut fungal microbiota in healthy shrimp, WFS shrimp exhibited significantly fewer Didymella, Podospora, and Lasiosphaeriaceae, whereas RG shrimp were enriched by Chaetothyriales species. For the hepatopancreas fungal microbiota, WFS shrimp exhibited significant enrichments of Zasmidum and Mycosphaerellaceae, while Nectriaceae was decreased in BG shrimp. Notably, some fungal phyla and taxa consistently responded to the three diseases compared with healthy shrimp. Accordingly, after ruling out the disease-specific taxa, the gut common disease-discriminatory fungal taxa contributed higher diagnosis accuracy (96.15%) than the hepatopancreas indicators did (87.50%). Netshift analysis revealed that the “driver” taxa were potential fungal pathogens that were rarely overlapped among WFS, BG and RG, which partially explained the divergence in their disease symptoms. There was a consistency between increased relative abundances of potential plant pathogens and proportions of predicted plant pathogens. Collectively, this is the few attempts to explore both the gut and hepatopancreas fungal microbiotas shrimp disease relationship. In particular, the incidences of shrimp diseases can be accurately and quantitatively diagnosed using the common disease-discriminatory fungal taxa, regardless of causal agents.