PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Rachael E. Antwis
AU  - Xavier A. Harrison
TI  - Diversity Predicts Ability of Bacterial Consortia to Mitigate a Lethal Wildlife Pathogen
AID  - 10.1101/123968
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 123968
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/04/25/123968.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/04/25/123968.full
AB  - Symbiotic bacterial communities can protect their hosts from infection by pathogens. Treatment of wild individuals with protective bacteria can combat the spread of emerging infectious diseases (EIDs), but it is unclear whether the degree of bacterially-mediated host protection is uniform across multiple isolates of globally-distributed pathogens. Here we use the lethal fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) as a model to investigate the traits predicting broad-scale in vitro inhibitory capabilities of both individual bacteria and multiple-bacterial consortia. We show that inhibition of multiple pathogen isolates is rare, with no clear phylogenetic signal at the genus level. Bacterial consortia offer stronger protection against B. dendrobatidis compared to single isolates, but critically this was only true for consortia containing multiple genera, and this pattern was not uniform across all B. dendrobatidis isolates. These novel insights have important implications for the effective design of bacterial probiotics to mitigate EIDs.