Exploring Effects of C. elegans Protective Natural Microbiota on Host Physiology.

Kohar Annie B Kissoyan,Barbara Pees,Christoph Giez,Jan Michels,Katja Dierking,Inga K Hamerich,Hinrich Schulenburg,Lena Peters

doi:10.3389/fcimb.2022.775728

Kohar Annie B Kissoyan, Barbara Pees + Show 6 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fcimb.2022.775728

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Abstract

The Caenorhabditis elegans natural microbiota was described only recently. Thus, our understanding of its effects on nematode physiology is still in its infancy. We previously showed that the C. elegans natural microbiota isolates Pseudomonas lurida MYb11 and P. fluorescens MYb115 protect the worm against pathogens such as Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). However, the overall effects of the protective microbiota on worm physiology are incompletely understood. Here, we investigated how MYb11 and MYb115 affect C. elegans lifespan, fertility, and intestinal colonization. We further studied the capacity of MYb11 and MYb115 to protect the worm against purified Bt toxins. We show that while MYb115 and MYb11 affect reproductive timing and increase early reproduction only MYb11 reduces worm lifespan. Moreover, MYb11 aggravates killing upon toxin exposure. We conclude that MYb11 has a pathogenic potential in some contexts. This work thus highlights that certain C. elegans microbiota members can be beneficial and costly to the host in a context-dependent manner, blurring the line between good and bad.

Highlights

All plants and animals coevolved with their resident microbes, the microbiota, with which they form an entity, the metaorganism (Bosch and McFall-Ngai, 2011)
As a first step to investigate the effects of the protective microbiota isolates P. lurida MYb11 and P. fluorescens MYb115 on C. elegans life-history traits, we grew worms on each of the microbiota isolates MYb11 and MYb115, or the control food bacterium E. coli OP50 and measured nematode fertility
We found that both microbiota isolates affected reproductive timing and increased early reproduction up to 22% and 31% on MYb11 and MYb115 respectively, at day two of adulthood compared to worms on OP50 (Figure 1A and Supplementary Table)

Summary

Introduction

All plants and animals coevolved with their resident microbes, the microbiota, with which they form an entity, the metaorganism (Bosch and McFall-Ngai, 2011). In contrast to the beneficial role of the microbiota in supporting host health, microbiota can have pathogenic potential in some contexts (reviewed in Stevens et al, 2021). Certain protective microbes can have divergent impacts on the host Knowledge of these divergent effects of microbiota on the host is crucial, for the development of microbiota-based therapeutic strategies (e.g., probiotics, Effects of Protective Microbiota on Physiology prebiotics, and fecal microbiota transplantation), as adverse effects can be devastating, especially for an impaired host (Jochum and Stecher, 2020; Stevens et al, 2021)

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