Microbial Diversity of the Red Sea Urchin Loxechinus albus during Controlled Farming in Puerto Montt, Chile, Using 16S rRNA Gene Amplicon Sequencing.

Daniel A Medina,Rudy Suárez,Marcos Godoy,Frank J Stewart

doi:10.1128/mra.00851-19

Abstract

Loxechinus albus is a shallow-water sea urchin, and its distribution is related to the cold water of the Southern Hemisphere. Recently, bacterial communities, also called microbiota, in sea urchins have started being explored. In this report, we have characterized the surface, testa, and gonad microbiota using 16S rRNA sequencing.

Highlights

Young specimens of Loxechinus albus (n ϭ 11, less than 5 cm in diameter) were collected from Experimental Fish Farming of Aquaculture and Marine Sciences of Metri (C74Wϩ7H Lenca, Puerto Montt, Chile)
806R primers (3) that were previously used to characterize the microbiota of the sea urchin Lytechinus variegatus (4) and the purple sea urchin Strongylocentrotus purpuratus (5)
The total number of high-quality reads in the phyloseq object used for characterizing the microbiota ranged between 11,234 and 105,551, with a mean of 34,601 and median of 28,110 reads

Summary

Introduction

Young specimens of Loxechinus albus (n ϭ 11, less than 5 cm in diameter) were collected from Experimental Fish Farming of Aquaculture and Marine Sciences of Metri (C74Wϩ7H Lenca, Puerto Montt, Chile). The PCR products were first checked in a 2% agarose gel to determine the quality of amplification and used to prepare a DNA library using the TruSeq DNA LT sample prep kit (Illumina, USA) following the manufacturer’s instructions. Sequencing was performed on a MiSeq instrument (Illumina, USA), obtaining a yield of 20,000 reads per sample, with a length of 2 ϫ 250-bp paired-end reads.

Results

Conclusion