Relationships Between Gastrointestinal Parasite Infections and the Fecal Microbiome in Free-Ranging Western Lowland Gorillas.

Klára Vlčková,Rebecca M Stumpf,Barbora Pafčo,David Modrý,Andres Gomez,Brenda A Wilson,Steven R Leigh,Carl J Yeoman,Karen E Nelson,Bryan A White,Angelique Todd,Klára J Petrželková,Manolito Torralba

doi:10.3389/fmicb.2018.01202

Abstract

Relationships between gastrointestinal parasites (GIPs) and the gastrointestinal microbiome (GIM) are widely discussed topics across mammalian species due to their possible impact on the host's health. GIPs may change the environment determining alterations in GIM composition. We evaluated the associations between GIP infections and fecal microbiome composition in two habituated and two unhabituated groups of wild western lowland gorillas (Gorilla g. gorilla) from Dzanga Sangha Protected Areas, Central African Republic. We examined 43 fecal samples for GIPs and quantified strongylid nematodes. We characterized fecal microbiome composition through 454 pyrosequencing of the V1-V3 region of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene. Entamoeba spp. infections were associated with significant differences in abundances of bacterial taxa that likely play important roles in nutrition and metabolism for the host, besides being characteristic members of the gorilla gut microbiome. We did not observe any relationships between relative abundances of several bacterial taxa and strongylid egg counts. Based on our findings, we suggest that there is a significant relationship between fecal microbiome and Entamoeba infection in wild gorillas. This study contributes to the overall knowledge about factors involved in modulating GIM communities in great apes.

Highlights

The mammalian gastrointestinal microbiome (GIM) is essential in providing access to nutrients, regulating epithelial development, and shaping immunity (Berg, 1996; Isolauri et al, 2004; Eckburg et al, 2005; Round and Mazmanian, 2009; Consortium, 2012)
As a part of the long-term non-invasive monitoring of gastrointestinal parasites (GIPs) infections and fecal microbiome/GIM of western lowland gorillas (Gorilla g. gorilla) in Dzanga Sangha Protected Areas (DSPA), Central African Republic (Sak et al, 2013; Hasegawa et al, 2014; Gomez et al, 2015, 2016b; Vlcková et al, 2016), we evaluate the associations between GIP infections and composition of fecal microbiome of free-ranging western lowland gorillas
We found no differences in overall GIM composition between Ent+ and Ent- gorillas according to analysis of similarities (ANOSIM) analyses: BrayCurtis dissimilarity matrices (R = 0.091, p = 0.017), weighted UniFrac (R = 0.040, p = 0.107), and unweighted UniFrac (R = 0.010, p = 0.296)

Summary

Introduction

The mammalian gastrointestinal microbiome (GIM) is essential in providing access to nutrients, regulating epithelial development, and shaping immunity (Berg, 1996; Isolauri et al, 2004; Eckburg et al, 2005; Round and Mazmanian, 2009; Consortium, 2012). The impact of gastrointestinal parasite (GIP) infections on the composition and activity of the GIM has received increasing attention and several studies have been conducted in humans and animals (Berrilli et al, 2012; Cantacessi et al, 2014; Kreisinger et al, 2015; Morton et al, 2015; Šlapeta et al, 2015; Audebert et al, 2016; Zaiss and Harris, 2016). GIP infections of western lowland gorilla have been studied using traditional and advanced techniques at several sites, with most of the studies conducted in Dzanga Sangha Protected Areas (Landsoud-Soukate et al, 1995; Lilly et al, 2002; Masi et al, 2012; Sak et al, 2013; Hasegawa et al, 2014; Pafco et al, 2017; Vlcková et al, 2018)

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