Microbiome profiling of the onion thrips, Thrips tabaci Lindeman (Thysanoptera: Thripidae)

Abstract

The gut microbial community structure of adult Thrips tabaci collected from 10 different agro-climatically diverse locations of India was characterized by using the Illumina MiSeq platform to amplify the V3 region of the 16S rRNA gene of bacteria present in the sampled insects. Analyses were performed to study the bacterial communities associated with Thrips tabaci in India. The complete bacterial metagenome of T. tabaci was comprised of 1662 OTUs of which 62.25% belong to known and 37.7% of unidentified/unknown bacteria. These OTUs constituted 21 bacterial phyla of 276 identified genera. Phylum Proteobacteria was predominant, followed by Actinobacteria, Firmicutes, Bacteroidetes and Cyanobacteria. Additionally, the occurrence of the reproductive endosymbiont, Wolbachia was detected at two locations (0.56%) of the total known OTUs. There is high variation in diversity and species richness among the different locations. Alpha-diversity metrics indicated the higher gut bacterial diversity at Bangalore and lowest at Rahuri whereas higher bacterial species richness at T. tabaci samples from Imphal and lowest at Jhalawar. Beta diversity analyses comparing bacterial communities between the samples showed distinct differences in bacterial community composition of T. tabaci samples from different locations. This paper also constitutes the first record of detailed bacterial communities associated with T. tabaci. The location-wise variation in microbial metagenome profile of T. tabaci suggests that bacterial diversity might be governed by its population genetic structure, environment and habitat.

Integrative Insight into Relationships between Florivorous Thrips Haplothrips leucanthemi and H. niger (Insecta, Thysanoptera)

“…Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, Firmicutes, and Bacteroidetes were found to be the most abundant bacterial phyla. Those groups are dominant in microbiota profiles of different insect species [ 54 , 55 , 56 ], and were also the most abundant in bacterial communities associated with other thrips, e.g., Hoplothrips carpathicus [ 57 ], Scirtothrips dorsalis [ 58 ], Thrips palmi [ 56 ], and T. tabaci [ 59 ].…”

Role of gut symbionts of insect pests: A novel target for insect-pest control

“…To decode the functional implications of these gut symbionts, it is necessary to study their distribution. Thus, we have summarized recent metagenomics studies (whole insect and insect gut) of several insect pests which is demonstrated by phylum wise composition of bacteria in Figure 1A ( Yong et al, 2017 ; Tokuda et al, 2018 ; Bozorov et al, 2019 ; Gawande et al, 2019 ; Shah et al, 2020 ; Asimakis et al, 2021 ; Deguenon et al, 2021 ; He et al, 2021 ; Tegtmeier et al, 2021 ; Yu et al, 2021 ; Csorba et al, 2022 ; Li S. et al, 2022 ; Majumder et al, 2022 ; Wang et al, 2022 ). We have noticed with taken examples that Proteobacteria, Firmicutes and Actinobacteria were the most dominant phyla present in the insect gut could be due to their diverse roles in nutrition.…”

Symbiotic Interaction Enhances the Recovery of Endangered Tree Species in the Fragmented Maulino Forest

“…To identify bacteria and fungi present in the samples, metagenomic sequences needed to be filtered for quality, aligned into contigs and compared to existing sequence databases (Gawande et al, 2019). Sequences were run through Trimmomatic 0.36 (Bolger et al, 2014) to remove low-quality base pairs, sequencing adapters and reads shorter than 100 bp; the following parameters were used: SLIDINGWINDOW 4:15 MINLEN: 36.…”