A Lethal Fungus Infects the Chinese White Wax Scale Insect and Causes Dramatic Changes in the Host Microbiota

Sun, Tao; Wang, Xueqing; Zhao, Zhihui; Yu, Shaohua; Yang, Pu; Chen, Xiaoming

doi:10.1038/s41598-018-23671-1

Cited by 14 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…The microbiota of the insect gut plays crucial roles in modulating the interactions between the insect host and intestinal pathogens. The infection of the Chinese white wax scale insect Ericerus pela by Cladosporium langeronii and C. sphaerospermum fungi had little effect on the fungal community but strongly influenced the bacterial community ( Sun et al, 2008 ). The pathogenic fungus Beauveria bassiana interacts with the gut microbiota of mosquitoes to accelerate host mortality, and fungal infection causes dysbiosis of mosquito gut microbiota with a significant increase in gut bacterial load and a significant decrease in bacterial diversity ( Wei et al, 2017 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infection of Ophiocordyceps sinensis Fungus Causes Dramatic Changes in the Microbiota of Its Thitarodes Host

Rao

Cao

et al. 2020

Front. Microbiol.

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The Chinese cordyceps is a unique and valuable parasitic complex of Thitarodes/Hepialus ghost moths and the Ophiocordyceps sinensis fungus for medicine and health foods from the Tibetan Plateau. During artificial cultivation of Chinese cordyceps, the induction of blastospores into hyphae is a prerequisite for mummification of the infected Thitarodes larvae. To explore the microbial involvement in the induction of mycelia-blastospore transition, the microbiota of the hemolymph and gut from Thitarodes xiaojinensis larvae with or without injected O. sinensis blastospores were investigated by culture-dependent and -independent methods. Twenty-five culturable bacterial species and 14 fungal species, together with 537 bacterial operational taxonomic units (OTUs) and 218 fungal OTUs, were identified from the hemolymph and gut of samples from five stages including living larvae without injected fungi (A) or with high blastospore load (B), mummifying larvae without mycelia coating (C), freshly mummifying larvae coated with mycelia (D), and completely mummified larvae with mycelia (E). Two culturable bacterial species (Serratia plymuthica, Serratia proteamaculans), and 47 bacterial and 15 fungal OTUs were considered as shared species. The uninfected larval hemolymph contained 13 culturable bacterial species but no fungal species, together with 164 bacterial and 73 fungal OTUs. To our knowledge, this is the first study to detect large bacterial communities from the hemolymph of healthy insect larvae. When the living larvae contained high blastospore load, the culturable bacterial community was sharply inhibited in the hemolymph but the bacterial and fungal community greatly increased in the gut. In general, high blastospore load increased bacterial diversity but sharply decreased fungal diversity in the hemolymph and gut by OTUs. The bacterial loads of four culturable species (Chryseobacterium sp., Pseudomonas fragi, S. plymuthica, S. proteamaculans) increased significantly and O. sinensis and Pseudomonas spp. became dominant microbes, when the infected larvae became mummified, indicating their possible involvement in the larval mummification process. The discovery of many opportunistic pathogenic bacteria in the hemolymph of the healthy larvae, the larval microbial diversity influenced by O. sinensis challenge and the involvement of dominant bacteria during larval mummification process provide new insight into the infection and mummification mechanisms of O. sinensis in its Thitarodes hosts.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infection of Ophiocordyceps sinensis Fungus Causes Dramatic Changes in the Microbiota of Its Thitarodes Host

Rao

Cao

et al. 2020

Front. Microbiol.

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“…microorganisms), and they influence both the host and its microbiota. This is also the case in insects, where literature suggests an effect of antibiotics (Hammer et al, 2016;Guégan et al, 2018;Koskinioti et al, 2019), agrochemicals (Kakumanu et al, 2016;Raymann et al, 2018;Receveur et al, 2018;Akami et al, 2019;Botina et al, 2019;Ding et al, 2019;Zhang and Yang, 2019;Li et al, 2020a), heavy metals (Zhu et al, 2018b;Rothman et al, 2019a,b;Li et al, 2020b), land use (Zhu et al, 2018a), pollutants (Duguma et al, 2017;Cassone et al, 2020), other microorganisms (Billiet et al, 2017;Sun et al, 2018;Zhang et al, 2018a;Vacheron et al, 2019) and irradiation (Cai et al, 2018;Stathopoulou et al, 2019) on insect-associated microbial communities. Interestingly, this study shows differences between control and treatment (regardless the nature of the treatment) in the structure but not in the diversity of insect-associated microbial communities.…”

Section: Response Of Bacterial Clades To Factors Influencing Insect Microbial Communitiesmentioning

confidence: 94%

Host species identity shapes the diversity and structure of insect microbiota

Malacrinò

2021

Preprint

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Microorganisms have an enormous impact on most of the life that inhabits our planet. Insects are an excellent example, as research showed that several microbial species are essential for insect nutrition, reproduction, fitness, defence and many other functions. More recently, we assisted to an exponential growth of studies describing the taxonomical composition of bacterial communities across insects' phylogeny. However, there is still an outstanding question that needs to be answered: which factors contribute most in shaping insects' microbiomes? This study tries to find an answer to this question by taking advantage of publicly available sequencing data and reanalysing over 4,000 samples of insect-associated bacterial communities under a common framework. Results suggest that insect taxonomy has a wider impact on the structure and diversity of their associated microbial communities than the other factors considered (diet, sex, life stage, sample origin and treatment). Also, a survey of the literature highlights several methodological limitations that needs to be considered in future research endeavours. This study proofs the amount of collective effort that lead to the current understanding of insect-microbiota interactions and their influence on insect biology, ecology and evolution with potential impact on insect conservation and management practices.

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“…Chinese white wax comprises cerylcerotate, its major component, the constituents of C26–C30 straight-chain, unsaturated fatty acids, and their corresponding fatty alcohols, such as hexacosanol and octacosanol [9]. Nowadays, although a number of waxes can replace Chinese white wax, it is still widely used in pharmaceutical production, e.g., in pill coating and for sealing medicine bottles to prevent denaturation of the drug during storage [10]. The melting point of Chinese white wax (83–86 °C) is higher than that of many other waxes, such as the widely used paraffin wax (50–60 °C), and this property is suited to the preparation of more stable SLNs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Chinese White Wax Solid Lipid Nanoparticles as a Novel Nanocarrier of Curcumin for Inhibiting the Formation of Staphylococcus aureus Biofilms

2019

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Chinese white wax solid lipid nanoparticles (cwSLNs) were prepared by high shear homogenization and ultrasound methods. Using an optimized formula, spherical cwSLNs with an average particle size of 401.9 ± 21.3 nm were obtained. The cwSLNs showed high entrapment efficiency, approximately 84.6%, for loading curcumin. The curcumin loaded cwSLNs (Cur-cwSLNs) exhibited sustained drug release properties. Notably, Cur-cwSLNs had a higher drug release rate at pH 4.5 than at pH 7.4, which suggested their applicability in an acidic environment. Cur-cwSLNs were able to inhibit the growth of Staphylococcus aureus and were more effective at reducing the biofilms produced by this bacterium compared to free curcumin. This study confirmed that cwSLNs may be novel carriers for increasing the bioavailability of curcumin with the potential to inhibit the formation of S. aureus biofilms.

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A Lethal Fungus Infects the Chinese White Wax Scale Insect and Causes Dramatic Changes in the Host Microbiota

Cited by 14 publications

References 31 publications

Infection of Ophiocordyceps sinensis Fungus Causes Dramatic Changes in the Microbiota of Its Thitarodes Host

Infection of Ophiocordyceps sinensis Fungus Causes Dramatic Changes in the Microbiota of Its Thitarodes Host

Host species identity shapes the diversity and structure of insect microbiota

Chinese White Wax Solid Lipid Nanoparticles as a Novel Nanocarrier of Curcumin for Inhibiting the Formation of Staphylococcus aureus Biofilms

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