Gut bacterial communities and their contribution to performance of specialist Altica flea beetles
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HOST MICROBE INTERACTIONS
Gut bacterial communities and their contribution to performance of specialist Altica flea beetles Jing Wei 1,2 & Kari A. Segraves 3,4 & Wen-Zhu Li 1 & Xing-Ke Yang 1 & Huai-Jun Xue 1 Received: 10 November 2019 / Accepted: 28 August 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Host plant shifts are a common mode of speciation in herbivorous insects. Although insects can evolve adaptations to successfully incorporate a new host plant, it is becoming increasingly recognized that the gut bacterial community may play a significant role in allowing insects to detoxify novel plant chemical defenses. Here, we examined differences in gut bacterial communities between Altica flea beetle species that feed on phylogenetically unrelated host plants in sympatry. We surveyed the gut bacterial communities of three closely related flea beetles from multiple locations using 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing. The results showed that the beetle species shared a high proportion (80.7%) of operational taxonomic units. Alpha-diversity indicators suggested that gut bacterial diversity did not differ among host species, whereas geography had a significant effect on bacterial diversity. In contrast, analyses of beta-diversity showed significant differences in gut bacterial composition among beetle species when we used species composition and relative abundance metrics, but there was no difference in composition when species presence/absence and phylogenetic distance indices were used. Within host beetle species, gut bacterial composition varied significantly among sites. A metagenomic functionality analysis predicted that the gut microbes had functions involved in xenobiotic biodegradation and metabolism as well as metabolism of terpenoids and polyketides. These predictions, however, did not differ among beetle host species. Antibiotic curing experiments showed that development time was significantly prolonged, and there was a significant decline in body weight of newly emerged adults in beetles lacking gut bacteria, suggesting the beetles may receive a potential benefit from the gut microbe-insect interaction. On the whole, our results suggest that although the gut bacterial community did not show clear host-specific patterns among Altica species, spatiotemporal variability is an important determinant of gut bacterial communities. Furthermore, the similarity of communities among these beetle species suggests that microbial facilitation may not be a determinant of host plant shifts in Altica. Keywords Adaptation . Antibiotic treatment . Body weight . Development time . Speciation
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-020-01590-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Xing-Ke Yang [email protected] * Huai-Jun Xue [email protected] 1
Key Laboratory of Zoological Systematics and Evolution, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beichen West Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100
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