Abstract
The key to 650 million years of evolutionary success in jellyfish is adaptability: with alternating benthic and pelagic generations, sexual and asexual reproductive modes, multitudes of body forms and a cosmopolitan distribution, jellyfish are likely to have established a plenitude of microbial associations. Here we explored bacterial assemblages in the scyphozoan jellyfish Chrysaora plocamia (Lesson 1832). Life stages involved in propagation through cyst formation, i.e., the mother polyp, its dormant cysts (podocysts), and polyps recently excysted (excysts) from podocysts – were investigated. Associated bacterial assemblages were assessed using MiSeq Illumina paired-end tag sequencing of the V1V2 region of the 16S rRNA gene. A microbial core-community was identified as present through all investigated life stages, including bacteria with closest relatives known to be key drivers of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur cycling. Moreover, the fact that half of C. plocamia’s core bacteria were also present in life stages of the jellyfish Aurelia aurita, suggests that this bacterial community might represent an intrinsic characteristic of scyphozoan jellyfish, contributing to their evolutionary success.
Highlights
Animals are becoming increasingly appreciated and studied as metaorganisms, or supraorganismal structures, closely associated with multi-lineage consortia of microorganisms, together representing a dynamic assemblage that results in a cometabolism between the animal and its microbiome (McFall-Ngai et al, 2013)
Permutational ANOVA revealed that neither date nor location of medusa sampling were predictive of community structure to any significance (p = 0.4), while the four life-stage groupings were able to account for 36% of the observed variance (p = 3e-5)
Principal coordinates analysis and hierarchical clustering both demonstrated some overlap among cyst groups, but a strong separation of polyp samples from all cyst samples (Figure 3)
Summary
Animals are becoming increasingly appreciated and studied as metaorganisms, or supraorganismal structures, closely associated with multi-lineage consortia of microorganisms (i.e., bacteria, archaea, eukaryotes, and viruses), together representing a dynamic assemblage that results in a cometabolism between the animal and its microbiome (McFall-Ngai et al, 2013). These relationships have evolved so closely that in some cases host development depends on signals from these microbes, and its immune system may even recognize specific microbes as part of itself (Gilbert et al, 2012; McFall-Ngai et al, 2013). A simple anatomy made up of two Jellyfish Associated Bacteria germ layers, separated by an extracellular matrix, and highly complex stinging cells (cnidocytes) characterizes these basal animals (Daly et al, 2007; Fautin, 2009; Rogers, 2009)
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