Fidelity varies in the symbiosis between a gutless marine worm and its microbial consortium
Sato, Yui, Wippler, Juliane, Wentrup, Cecilia, Ansorge, Rebecca, Sadowski, Miriam, Gruber-Vodicka, Harald, Dubilier, Nicole, and Kleiner, Manuel (2022) Fidelity varies in the symbiosis between a gutless marine worm and its microbial consortium. Microbiome, 10. 178.
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Abstract
Background: Many animals live in intimate associations with a species-rich microbiome. A key factor in maintaining these beneficial associations is fidelity, defined as the stability of associations between hosts and their microbiota over multiple host generations. Fidelity has been well studied in terrestrial hosts, particularly insects, over longer macroevolutionary time. In contrast, little is known about fidelity in marine animals with species-rich microbiomes at short microevolutionary time scales, that is at the level of a single host population. Given that natural selection acts most directly on local populations, studies of microevolutionary partner fidelity are important for revealing the ecological and evolutionary processes that drive intimate beneficial associations within animal species.
Results: In this study on the obligate symbiosis between the gutless marine annelid Olavius algarvensis and its consortium of seven co-occurring bacterial symbionts, we show that partner fidelity varies across symbiont species from strict to absent over short microevolutionary time. Using a low-coverage sequencing approach that has not yet been applied to microbial community analyses, we analysed the metagenomes of 80 O. algarvensis individuals from the Mediterranean and compared host mitochondrial and symbiont phylogenies based on single-nucleotide polymorphisms across genomes. Fidelity was highest for the two chemoautotrophic, sulphur-oxidizing symbionts that dominated the microbial consortium of all O. algarvensis individuals. In contrast, fidelity was only intermediate to absent in the sulphate-reducing and spirochaetal symbionts with lower abundance. These differences in fidelity are likely driven by both selective and stochastic forces acting on the consistency with which symbionts are vertically transmitted.
Conclusions: We hypothesize that variable degrees of fidelity are advantageous for O. algarvensis by allowing the faithful transmission of their nutritionally most important symbionts and flexibility in the acquisition of other symbionts that promote ecological plasticity in the acquisition of environmental resources.
Item ID: | 76769 |
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Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
ISSN: | 2049-2618 |
Copyright Information: | © The Author(s) 2022. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativeco mmons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
Date Deposited: | 11 Nov 2022 01:49 |
FoR Codes: | 31 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 3103 Ecology > 310305 Marine and estuarine ecology (incl. marine ichthyology) @ 20% 31 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 3104 Evolutionary biology > 310405 Evolutionary ecology @ 60% 31 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 3107 Microbiology > 310703 Microbial ecology @ 20% |
SEO Codes: | 28 EXPANDING KNOWLEDGE > 2801 Expanding knowledge > 280102 Expanding knowledge in the biological sciences @ 100% |
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