Factors shaping the gut bacterial community assembly in two main Colombian malaria vectors

Abstract

BackgroundThe understanding of the roles of gut bacteria in the fitness and vectorial capacity of mosquitoes that transmit malaria, is improving; however, the factors shaping the composition and structure of such bacterial communities remain elusive. In this study, a high-throughput 16S rRNA gene sequencing was conducted to understand the effect of developmental stage, feeding status, species, and geography on the composition of the gut bacterial microbiota of two main Colombian malaria vectors, Anopheles nuneztovari and Anopheles darlingi.ResultsThe results revealed that mosquito developmental stage, followed by geographical location, are more important determinants of the gut bacterial composition than mosquito species or adult feeding status. Further, they showed that mosquito gut is a major filter for environmental bacteria colonization.ConclusionsThe sampling design and analytical approach of this study allowed to untangle the influence of factors that are simultaneously shaping the microbiota composition of two Latin-American malaria vectors, essential aspect for the design of vector biocontrol strategies.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s40168-018-0528-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The microbiome of pest insects: it is not just bacteria

“… Culture‐independent techniques have captured how microbial community composition in insects varies largely in time and space‐in response to diet, geography, season, and developmental stage (Hu et al., ; Wilhelm et al., ; Chaplinska et al., ; Lv et al., ; Vacchini et al, ; Bascuñán et al., ). The relevance of these parameters might vary according to the microbial groups, with environmental factors being more important for bacteria and fungi than in shaping the viral communities (Nouri et al., ).…”

Use of Microbiota to Fight Mosquito-Borne Disease

“…In this review, we focus on prokaryotes and eukaryotic microbes. The mosquito gut microbiota is mainly acquired from the environment (Wang et al, 2017;Strand, 2018), and its composition is highly dynamic, varying greatly with species, nutrition, stage of mosquito development, and geography (Tchioffo et al, 2015;Minard et al, 2017;Novakova et al, 2017;Bascunan et al, 2018;Krajacich et al, 2018;Muturi et al, 2018;Telang et al, 2018;Duguma et al, 2019). Sequencing of the 16S rRNA or18S rRNA hypervariable regions is used as a culture-independent approach to study mosquito microbiota composition (Pidiyar et al, 2004;Belda et al, 2017).…”

Comprehensive characterization of internal and cuticle surface microbiota of laboratory-reared F1Anopheles albimanus originating from different sites

“…Sequencing outputs were demultiplexed and converted to the fastq format for downstream analysis using the bcl2fastq (v2. 19…”

“…In malaria vectors for example, studies on the microbiota have largely focused on Sub-Saharan African species-in particular, Anopheles gambiae-and to a lesser extent on those from Southeast Asia [18]. In contrast, the microbiota of Latin American malaria vectors have only recently been comprehensively characterized [7,8,[19][20][21], with these studies describing associations between An. albimanus microbiota and insecticide resistance [7,8], and the factors that shape the composition of An.…”