Heavy-metal Pollution Affects Daphnia Fitness by Altering Diversity of the Gut Microbiota
Yang, Wenwu, Deng, Zhixiong, Blair, David, Hu, Wei, and Yin, Mingbo (2025) Heavy-metal Pollution Affects Daphnia Fitness by Altering Diversity of the Gut Microbiota. Microbial Ecology, 88 (1). 130.
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Abstract
The role of gut microbiota in shaping host fitness is already well established. However, it remains unclear to what extent the gut microbiota influences host fitness in the presence of environmental stressors. Here, we tested the hypothesis that responses of water flea Daphnia to the heavy metal nickel are mediated by gut microbiota. Germ-free D. magna exhibited somewhat lower fitness than did those with gut microbiota transplant. Among germ-free Daphnia, those that were exposed to heavy metals did not differ in fitness from unexposed Daphnia. In contrast, when incubated with their donors’ gut microbiota, initially germ-free D. magna continuously exposed to nickel for 21 days showed a significantly lower survival rate than those not exposed to nickel. We detected a reduced set of microbes in the formerly germ-free Daphnia in the presence of nickel. Transcriptomic analysis of Daphnia showed that expression/regulation of genes related to oxygen transport, chitin metabolism, and detoxification changed in response to the reduced gut microbiomes acquired in the presence of nickel. Our findings show that the toxic effects of heavy metal led to a reduced diversity of gut microbiota in Daphnia and can thus affect host fitness.
| Item ID: | 89898 |
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| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 1432-184X |
| Keywords: | Diversity, Fitness, Germ-free Daphnia, Gut microbiota, Heavy metal, Transcriptomics |
| Copyright Information: | © The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, 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 you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. 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-nc-nd/4.0/. |
| Date Deposited: | 24 Jul 2026 04:02 |
| FoR Codes: | 31 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 3107 Microbiology > 310703 Microbial ecology @ 100% |
| SEO Codes: | 28 EXPANDING KNOWLEDGE > 2801 Expanding knowledge > 280102 Expanding knowledge in the biological sciences @ 100% |
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