Worldwide exploration of the microbiome harbored by the cnidarian model, Exaiptasia pallida indicates a lack of bacterial association specificity at a lower taxonomic rank
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Marine Biology, Microbiology
- Keywords
- Cnidaria, host-microbe interaction, sea anemone, microbiome, coral, symbiosis
- Copyright
- © 2016 Brown et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Worldwide exploration of the microbiome harbored by the cnidarian model, Exaiptasia pallida indicates a lack of bacterial association specificity at a lower taxonomic rank. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2338v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2338v1
Abstract
Examination of host-microbe interactions in basal metazoans, such as cnidarians is of great interest from an evolutionary perspective to understand how host-microbial consortia have evolved. To address this problem, we analyzed whether the bacterial community associated with the cosmopolitan and model sea anemone Exaiptasia pallida shows specific patterns across worldwide populations ranging from the Caribbean Sea, and the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. By comparing sequences of the V1-V4 hypervariable regions of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene, we revealed that anemones host a complex and diverse microbial community. When examined at the phylum level, bacterial diversity and abundance associated with E. pallida are broadly conserved across geographic space with samples, containing largely Proteobacteria and Bacteroides. However, the species-level makeup within these phyla differs drastically across space suggesting a high-level core microbiome with local adaptation of the constituents. Indeed, no bacterial OTU was ubiquitously found in all anemones samples. We also revealed changes in the microbial community structure after rearing anemone specimens in captivity within a period of four months. These results contrast with the postulation that cnidarian hosts might actively select and maintain species-specific microbial communities that could have resulted from an intimate co-evolution process. Instead, our findings suggest that environmental settings, not host specificity seem to dictate bacterial community structure associated with this sea anemone. More than maintaining a specific composition of bacterial species some cnidarians associate with a wide range of bacterial species as long as they provide the same physiological benefits towards the maintenance of a healthy host. The examination of the previously uncharacterized bacterial community associated with the cnidarian sea anemone model E. pallida is the first global-scale study of its kind.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
Supplemental Information
Prevalence and distribution of bacterial classes within the phylum Proteobacteria
Prevalence and distribution of bacterial classes within the phylum Proteobacteria identified in the microbial community associated with the anemone Exaiptasia pallida across all population sites.
Frequency of V1-V2 16S rDNA OTUs shared among samples collected in the study
Frequency of V1-V2 16S rDNA OTUs shared among samples collected in the study. Inset shows a close-up section of the main graph displaying the few OTUs shared from 79% to 40% of the analyzed samples.
Average number and standard deviation of OTUs found in all samples by population location
Average number and standard deviation of OTUs found in all samples by population location.