Abstract
The gut microbial community structure of adult Thrips tabaci collected from 10 different agro-climatically diverse locations of India was characterized by using the Illumina MiSeq platform to amplify the V3 region of the 16S rRNA gene of bacteria present in the sampled insects. Analyses were performed to study the bacterial communities associated with Thrips tabaci in India. The complete bacterial metagenome of T. tabaci was comprised of 1662 OTUs of which 62.25% belong to known and 37.7% of unidentified/unknown bacteria. These OTUs constituted 21 bacterial phyla of 276 identified genera. Phylum Proteobacteria was predominant, followed by Actinobacteria, Firmicutes, Bacteroidetes and Cyanobacteria. Additionally, the occurrence of the reproductive endosymbiont, Wolbachia was detected at two locations (0.56%) of the total known OTUs. There is high variation in diversity and species richness among the different locations. Alpha-diversity metrics indicated the higher gut bacterial diversity at Bangalore and lowest at Rahuri whereas higher bacterial species richness at T. tabaci samples from Imphal and lowest at Jhalawar. Beta diversity analyses comparing bacterial communities between the samples showed distinct differences in bacterial community composition of T. tabaci samples from different locations. This paper also constitutes the first record of detailed bacterial communities associated with T. tabaci. The location-wise variation in microbial metagenome profile of T. tabaci suggests that bacterial diversity might be governed by its population genetic structure, environment and habitat.
Highlights
Bacterial communities in insects play an important role in their growth, development, immunological, physiological and morphological functioning
Microorganisms exhibit a variety of interactions with their hosts and most of the time these interactions are beneficial to the insect [40]
In this study phyla Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes together constituted more than 90% of the total T. tabaci identified microbiome
Summary
Bacterial communities in insects play an important role in their growth, development, immunological, physiological and morphological functioning. Some are reported to negatively impact insects by causing sterility and distorting sex ratios [11,12]. Despite their influence on important metabolic processes in the host, they have not been accurately profiled due to the difficulty in isolating and culturing many of the symbionts. Characterizing the diversity of symbionts is an important first step towards understanding their importance in the life history of organisms
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