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Parasites as niche modifiers for the microbiome: A field test with multiple parasites

View ORCID ProfileKayleigh R. O’Keeffe, View ORCID ProfileFletcher W. Halliday, View ORCID ProfileCorbin D. Jones, View ORCID ProfileIgnazio Carbone, View ORCID ProfileCharles E. Mitchell
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.31.018713
Kayleigh R. O’Keeffe
1Department of Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
2Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
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  • For correspondence: kokeeffe@sas.upenn.edu
Fletcher W. Halliday
1Department of Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
3Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Zurich, CH
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Corbin D. Jones
1Department of Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
4Carolina Center for Genome Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
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Ignazio Carbone
5Center for Integrated Fungal Research, Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA
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Charles E. Mitchell
1Department of Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
6Environment, Ecology and Energy Program, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
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Abstract

Parasites can affect and be affected by the host’s microbiome, with consequences for host susceptibility, parasite transmission, and host and parasite fitness. Yet, there are two aspects of the relationship between parasite infection and the host microbiome that remain little understood: the nature of the relationship under field conditions, and how the relationship varies among parasite species. To overcome these limitations, we assayed the within-leaf fungal community in a grass population to investigate how diversity and composition of the fungal microbiome are associated with natural infection by fungal parasites with different feeding strategies. We hypothesized that parasites that more strongly modify niches available within a host will thereby alter the microbial taxa that can colonize the community and be associated with greater changes in microbiome diversity and composition. A parasite that creates necrotic tissue to extract resources (necrotrophs) may act as a particularly strong niche modifier whereas one that does not (biotrophs) may not. Barcoded amplicon sequencing of the fungal ITS region revealed that the microbiome of leaf segments that were symptomatic of necrotrophs had lower fungal diversity and distinct composition compared to segments that were asymptomatic or symptomatic of other parasites. There were no clear differences in fungal diversity or composition between leaf segments that were asymptomatic and segments that were symptomatic of other parasite feeding strategies. This supports the hypothesis that within-host niches link infection by parasites to the host’s microbiome. Together, these results highlight the importance of parasite traits in determining parasite impacts on the host’s microbiome.

Footnotes

  • https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.5x69p8d0v

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
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Posted April 01, 2020.
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Parasites as niche modifiers for the microbiome: A field test with multiple parasites
Kayleigh R. O’Keeffe, Fletcher W. Halliday, Corbin D. Jones, Ignazio Carbone, Charles E. Mitchell
bioRxiv 2020.03.31.018713; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.31.018713
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Parasites as niche modifiers for the microbiome: A field test with multiple parasites
Kayleigh R. O’Keeffe, Fletcher W. Halliday, Corbin D. Jones, Ignazio Carbone, Charles E. Mitchell
bioRxiv 2020.03.31.018713; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.31.018713

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