RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Parasites as niche modifiers for the microbiome: A field test with multiple parasites
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.03.31.018713
DO 10.1101/2020.03.31.018713
A1 Kayleigh R. O’Keeffe
A1 Fletcher W. Halliday
A1 Corbin D. Jones
A1 Ignazio Carbone
A1 Charles E. Mitchell
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/04/01/2020.03.31.018713.abstract
AB 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.