Abstract
A balanced, diverse gut microbiota is vital for animal health. The microbial population is shaped by multiple factors including genetic background and environment, but other determinants remain controversial. Numerous studies suggest that the dominant factor is genetic background while others emphasize the environmental factors. Here, we bred asexual hybridization queens (AHQs) of honeybees through nutritional crossbreeding (laid in Apis mellifera colony but bred in Apis cerana colony), sequenced their gut microbiome, and compared it with normally bred sister queens to determine the primary factor shaping the gut microbiota. Our results showed that the dominant genera in the gut microbiota of AHQs were Brevundimonas, Bombella, and Lactobacillus, and its microbial community was more related to A. mellifera queens. The AHQs had a moderate number of different bacterial species and diversity, but total bacterial numbers were low. There were more significant taxa identified in the comparison between AHQ and A. cerana queen according to LEfSe analysis results. The only genetic-specific taxon we figured out was Brevundimonas. The growth of core bacterial abundance showed different characteristics among different queen groups in the first week after emerging. Collectively, this study suggested that the genetic background played a more dominant role than environmental factors in shaping the gut microbiota of honeybee queen and the microbiota of midgut was more sensitive than that of rectum to this impact.
Highlights
Diverse microbial communities colonize different host tissues, with the gut harboring the densest and most diverse range of species (Martinson et al, 2012)
20 midgut and rectal gDNAs were extracted from queen samples and used for sequencing library preparation, while another 27 midgut and 27 rectal gDNA extracted from 27 queen samples participated in quantitative PCR (qPCR)
In order to get the reciprocal resultant data from the other kind of asexual hybridization queens (AHQs), four times efforts have ended and we still failed with 0% acceptance of the reverse crossbreeding experiments
Summary
Diverse microbial communities colonize different host tissues, with the gut harboring the densest and most diverse range of species (Martinson et al, 2012). There is great variability in the microbial population between each individual worker, these microbes could rarely be found in honeybee living environments, including pupae, frame, and hive (Engel and Moran, 2013; Powell et al, 2014) We believe that this phenomenon indicates that there may have been a strong mutual selection between the gut microbiota and the host during evolution, and the explanation for this phenomenon can be seen from the biological characteristics of the social lifestyle of honeybees (Kwong et al, 2017). As a social behavior, mutual feeding provides a stable pathway for the transfer of the gut microbiota between individuals and is of great significance for the early growth of core members to occupy key metabolic niches (Powell et al, 2014) This pattern of social transmission can be found in other social living animals and humans (Marcobal and Sonnenburg, 2012). This study may help to reveal how social living affects the gut microbiota and allow a deeper exploration of its relationship with the host during coevolution
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