Abstract
The functional relevance of microbiota is a key aspect for understanding host–microbiota interactions. Mammalian skin harbours a complex consortium of beneficial microorganisms known to provide health and immune-boosting advantages. As yet, however, little is known about functional microbial communities on avian feathers, including their co-evolution with the host and factors determining feather microbiota (FM) diversity. Using 16S rRNA profiling, we investigated how host species identity, phylogeny and geographic origin determine FM in free-living passerine birds. Moreover, we estimated the relative abundance of bacteriocin-producing bacteria (BPB) and keratinolytic feather damaging bacteria (FDB) and evaluated the ability of BPB to affect FM diversity and relative abundance of FDB. Host species identity was associated with feather bacterial communities more strongly than host geographic origin. FM functional properties differed in terms of estimated BPB and FDB relative abundance, with both showing interspecific variation. FM diversity was negatively associated with BPB relative abundance across species, whereas BPB and FDB relative abundance was positively correlated. This study provides the first thorough evaluation of antimicrobial peptides-producing bacterial communities inhabiting the feather integument, including their likely potential to mediate niche-competition and to be associated with functional species-specific feather microbiota in avian hosts.
Highlights
Supplementary information The online version of this article contains supplementary material, which is available to authorised users.Intensive microbiome studies across a range of ecosystems and animal taxa have revealed apparent co-evolution between microbes and their hosts [1, 2]
The feather microbiota (FM) profiles of almost all passerine species examined, apart from the sand martin (Riparia riparia) and common redstart (Phoenicurus phoenicurus), were dominated by the phyla Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria and Bacteroidetes, with Alphaproteobacteria, Gammaproteobacteria and Betaproteobacteria dominating at class-level taxonomy (Fig. 1)
To demonstrate that the sampling scheme and associated distance-based Redundancy Analyses (db-RDAs) analyses did not confound the effect of species identity on FM divergence, an additional db-RDA analyses were conducted on a subset of the remaining three species
Summary
Despite a dominance of studies focused on commercially exploited species [9, 10], freeliving birds and their wild microbiota have become a pivotal theme in avian microbiome research. Most of these studies have focused on gut microbiota, with New World vultures showing a highly conserved and selective gut microbiota resulting from diet specialisation [11], co-diversification of gastrointestinal microbiota and phylogeny in passerines [12] and temporal stability and transgenerational transfer of gut microbiota in a socially living bird [13]. Aside from three recent studies [14,15,16], the microbiota inhabiting skin and its derivatives in free-living birds have remained largely neglected
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