Evolutionary signal in the gut microbiomes of 74 bird species from Equatorial Guinea

Capunitan, Darien C.; Johnson, Oscar W.; Terrill, Ryan S.; Hird, Sarah M.

doi:10.1111/mec.15354

Cited by 69 publications

(91 citation statements)

References 102 publications

(141 reference statements)

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“…The microbes responding to these differences may depend on the taxonomic composition of the starting microbiome. This specieslevel regional variation in gut microbiomes and the exible nature of passerine microbiomes to dietary changes further support the lack of [16,20] or weak [62] association between bird gut microbiome structure and host phylogeny.…”

Section: P Major Gut Microbiomes Respond To Diet Changes But Not Asmentioning

confidence: 54%

“…Although microbiome composition in mammals is affected by diet [21][22][23][24][25][26], mammalian gut microbiomes are tightly associated with host phylogeny [19,20], often accompanied by taxon-speci c diets [12]. In contrast, although bird taxonomy, such as host family, is associated with certain microbiome characteristics [15,16], microbial compositions tend to not be strongly associated with host phylogeny [16,20]. In line with this, bird microbiomes also exhibit higher individual variation, conceivably caused by dietary, environmental and social factors [14,[27][28][29][30][31].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…The establishment and maintenance of symbiosis between hosts and their gut microbiota are pivotal in the evolutionary history of animals, where microbial symbionts play a multitude of roles in nutrient management, host development and host immunity [1][2][3]. Diet and host taxonomy are major drivers of assemblies of gut microbial communities across diverse animal taxa, including insects [4][5][6][7], spiders [8], sh [9,10], frogs [11], mammals [12,13], and birds [14][15][16][17][18]. In vertebrates, most work to understand the importance of these factors stems from mammals and birds [12,17,19,20], with intriguing differences between the two [19,20].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Flexibility and resilience of Great tit (Parus major) gut microbiomes to changing diets

Bodawatta

Freiberga

Puzejova

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Background: Gut microbial communities play important roles in nutrient management and can change in response to host diets. The extent of this flexibility and the concomitant resilience is largely unknown in wild animals. To begin untangling the dynamics of avian-gut microbiome symbiosis associated with diet changes, we exposed Parus major (Great tits) fed with a standard diet (seeds and mealworms) to either a mixed (seeds, mealworms and fruits), a seed, or a mealworm diet for four weeks, and examined the flexibility of gut microbiomes to these compositionally different diets. To assess microbiome resilience (recovery potential), all individuals were subsequently reversed to a standard diet for another four weeks. Cloacal microbiomes were collected weekly and characterised through sequencing the v4 region of the 16S rRNA gene using Illumina MiSeq. Results: Initial microbiomes changed significantly with the diet manipulation but the communities did not differ significantly between the three diet groups (mixed, seed and mealworm), despite multiple diet-specific changes of specific bacterial genera. Reverting birds to the standard diet led to only a partial recovery in gut community compositions. The majority of the bacterial taxa that increased significantly during diet manipulation decreased in relative abundances after reversion to the standard diet; however, bacterial taxa that decreased during the manipulation rarely increased after diet reversal.Conclusions: The gut microbial response and partial resilience to dietary changes support that gut bacterial communities of P. major play a role in accommodating dietary changes experienced by wild avian hosts. This may be a contributing factor to the relaxed association between microbiome composition and bird phylogeny. Our findings further imply that interpretations of wild bird gut microbiome analyses from single-time point sampling, especially for omnivorous species or species that have changing seasonal diets, should be done with caution. The partial community recovery implies that ecologically relevant diet changes (e.g., seasonality and migration) open up gut niches that may be filled by previously abundant microbes or replaced by different symbiont lineages, which has important implications for the integrity and specificity of long-term avian-symbiont associations.

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Section: P Major Gut Microbiomes Respond To Diet Changes But Not Asmentioning

confidence: 54%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Flexibility and resilience of Great tit (Parus major) gut microbiomes to changing diets

Bodawatta

Freiberga

Puzejova

et al. 2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…The two wintering sites indeed have geographic differences, which might influence differently the gut microbiota of Great Bustards. However, the effect of geographic location on differences in gut microbiota have been attributed on changes of food availability (San Juan et al, 2020), suggesting changes in microbiota communities could be more sensitive to dietary shifts rather than location (Capunitan et al, 2020). Differences in relative protein, fat, and fiber content may cause changes of microbiota composition and diversity (Clarke et al, 2014).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of Sex and Diet on Gut Microbiota of Farmland-Dependent Wintering Birds

et al. 2020

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Gut microbiota plays an important role for bird biological and ecological properties, and sex and diet may be important intrinsic and extrinsic factors influencing gut microbial communities. However, sex difference of gut microbiota has been rarely investigated in free-living birds, and it remains unclear how sex and diet interactively affect avian gut microbiota composition and diversity, particularly under natural conditions. Here we used non-invasive molecular sexing technique to sex the fecal samples collected from two wintering sites of Great Bustard, which is the most sexually dimorphic among birds, as well as a typical farmland-dependent wintering bird. High-throughput sequencing of 16S was applied to identify the gut microbiota communities for both sexes under two diets (wheat_corn and rice_peanut). The results showed that 9.74% of common microbiota taxa was shared among four groups (sex vs. diet), revealing the conservatism of gut microbiota. Microbiota diversity, composition and abundance varied on different diets for male and female Great Bustards, suggesting that the gut microbiota was interactively influenced by both sex and diet. Under the wheat_corn diet, females had higher abundances of the phylum Verrucomicrobia than males, but lower Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes compared to males; meanwhile, the microbiota diversity and evenness were higher for males than females. In contrast, under the rice_peanut diet, females were more colonized by the phylum Firmicutes than males, but less by the phylum Bacteroidetes; while males had lower microbiota diversity and evenness than females. This study investigated the impacts of sex and diet on microbiota of Great Bustards, and highlights the need of new studies, perhaps with the same methodology, taking into account bird ages, flock size, breeding or health status, which will contribute to the understanding of ecology and conservation of this vulnerable species.

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“…to avian phylogenetic relationships [12][13][14][15][16][17][18], the most extensive of which was conducted using individuals from 491 species (representing 34 orders) of birds [18]. While most of these studies detected a statistically significant effect of taxonomy (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A bird's-eye view of phylosymbiosis: weak signatures of phylosymbiosis among all 15 species of cranes

et al. 2020

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In numerous animal clades, the evolutionary history of host species drives patterns of gut microbial community structure, resulting in more divergent microbiota with increasing phylogenetic distance between hosts. This phenomenon, termed phylosymbiosis, has been observed in diverse evolutionary lineages, but has been difficult to detect in birds. Previous tests of phylosymbiosis among birds have been conducted using wild individuals, and thus interspecific differences in diet and environment may have masked a phylogenetic signal. Therefore, we tested for phylosymbiosis among all 15 species of cranes (family Gruidae) housed in the same captive environment and maintained on identical diets. 16S rRNA sequencing revealed that crane species harbour distinct gut microbiota. Overall, we detected marginally significant patterns of phylosymbiosis, the strength of which was increased when including the estimates of absolute microbial abundance (rather than relative abundance) derived from microbial densities determined by flow cytometry. Using this approach, we detected the statistically significant signatures of phylosymbiosis only after removing male cranes from our analysis, suggesting that using mixed-sex animal cohorts may prevent the detection of phylosymbiosis. Though weak compared with mammals (and especially insects), these results provide evidence of phylosymbiosis in birds. We discuss the potential differences between birds and mammals, such as transmission routes and host filtering, that may underlie the differences in the strength of phylosymbiosis.

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Evolutionary signal in the gut microbiomes of 74 bird species from Equatorial Guinea

Cited by 69 publications

References 102 publications

Flexibility and resilience of Great tit (Parus major) gut microbiomes to changing diets

Flexibility and resilience of Great tit (Parus major) gut microbiomes to changing diets

Effects of Sex and Diet on Gut Microbiota of Farmland-Dependent Wintering Birds

A bird's-eye view of phylosymbiosis: weak signatures of phylosymbiosis among all 15 species of cranes

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