Diversity of bacterial symbionts associated with the tropical plant bug Monalonion velezangeli (Hemiptera: Miridae) revealed by high-throughput 16S rRNA sequencing.

Abstract

Insects and microbes have developed complex symbiotic relationships that evolutively and ecologically play beneficial roles for both, the symbiont and the host. In most Hemiptera insects, bacterial symbionts offer mainly nutritional, defense and reproductive roles and have promoted the adaptive radiation of several hemipteran phytophagous lineages. The tropical plant bug Monalonion velezangeli (Hemiptera: Miridae) is a polyphagous herbivore considered an important insect pest for several economically-relevant tropical crops; however, information about the composition of its bacterial microbiota was missing. In this study, we describe the diversity and structure of the bacterial microbiota in the nymph and adult life stages of M. velezangeli using Illumina high-throughput sequencing of 16S ribosomal RNA gene amplicons (meta-barcoding). We found that both insect life stages share a similar microbiota in terms of bacterial diversity and community structure. The intracellular symbiont Wolbachia (~92%) dominated the overall microbiome composition in these life stages, followed by the potential gut-associated bacteria genera Romboutsia (1.8%), Ignavibacterium (0.8%) and Clostridium (0.70%) as the top most abundant taxa. The persistent presence of bacterial genera Romboutsia , Ignavibacterium, Clostridium, Paracoccus, Allobaculum, Methylobacterium, Sediminibacterium, Faecalibaculum, Faecalibacterium, Collinsella, Rothia and Sphingomonas suggest these are members of the core microbiota and could play important biological roles for M. velezangeli . This data opens new questions and avenues to better understand the contribution of symbiotic bacteria in the biological performance of this insect pest.

Diversity of bacterial symbionts associated with the tropical plant bug Monalonion velezangeli (Hemiptera: Miridae) revealed by high-throughput 16S-rRNA sequencing

“…Taxonomic distributon of ASVs included 10 bacteria phyla, 18 classes, 22 orders, 33 families and 36 genera. Distributon of relatve abundances for phylum, order and genus levels are shown in Figure 2 and fully detailed for all taxonomic levels in Supplementary Tables S2 to S6 (Navarro-Escalante et al, 2024). Overall, the Phylum Proteobacteria (92.6%) and Firmicutes (5.2%) represented almost the full microbiota detected in this study (Supplementary Table S2, Figure 2A).…”

“…The datasets generated or analyzed during the current study are included in this artcle and its supplementary data (htps://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10524900; Navarro-Escalante et al, 2024). The raw sequence data is accessible at the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (SRA) database under the bioproject number PRJNA875474 (htp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bioproject/875474).…”