Document Type

Article

Author ORCID Identifier

Zakee L. Sabree https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9310-1641

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Applied and Environmental Microbiology

Volume

91

Issue

2

Publisher

American Society for Microbiology

Publication Date

1-30-2025

Journal Article Version

Version of Record

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

First Page

1

Last Page

12

Abstract

Many animals contain a species-rich and diverse gut microbiota that likely contributes to several host-supportive services that include diet processing and nutrient provisioning. Loss of microbiome taxa and their associated metabolic functions as result of perturbations may result in loss of microbiome-level services and reduction of metabolic capacity. If metabolic functions are shared by multiple taxa (i.e., functional redundancy), including deeply divergent lineages, then the impact of taxon/function losses may be dampened. We examined to what degree alterations in phylotype diversity impact microbiome-level metabolic capacity. Feeding two nutritionally imbalanced diets to omnivorous Periplaneta americana over 8 weeks reduced the diversity of their phylotype-rich gut microbiomes by ~25% based on 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing, yet PICRUSt2-inferred metabolic pathway richness was largely unaffected due to their being polyphyletic. We concluded that the nonlinearity between taxon and metabolic functional losses is due to microbiome members sharing many well-characterized metabolic functions, with lineages remaining after perturbation potentially being capable of preventing microbiome “service outages” due to functional redundancy.

Download

Included in

Biology Commons

Share

COinS