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Immune challenge reduces gut microbial diversity and triggers fertility-dependent gene expression changes in a social insect.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND:The gut microbiome can influence life history traits associated with host fitness such as fecundity and longevity. In most organisms, these two life history traits are traded-off, while they are positively linked in social insects. In ants, highly fecund queens can live for decades, while their non-reproducing workers exhibit much shorter lifespans. Yet, when fertility is induced in workers by death or removal of the queen, worker lifespan can increase. It is unclear how this positive link between fecundity and longevity is achieved and what role the gut microbiome and the immune system play in this. To gain insights into the molecular regulation of lifespan in social insects, we investigated fat body gene expression and gut microbiome composition in workers of the ant Temnothorax rugatulus in response to an experimental induction of fertility and an immune challenge. RESULTS:Fertile workers upregulated several molecular repair mechanisms, which could explain their extended lifespan. The immune challenge altered the expression of several thousand genes in the fat body, including many immune genes, and, interestingly, this transcriptomic response depended on worker fertility. For example, only fertile, immune-challenged workers upregulated genes involved in the synthesis of alpha-ketoglutarate, an immune system regulator, which extends the lifespan in Caenorhabditis elegans by down-regulating the TOR pathway and reducing oxidant production. Additionally, we observed a dramatic loss in bacterial diversity in the guts of the ants within a day of the immune challenge. Yet, bacterial density did not change, so that the gut microbiomes of many immune challenged workers consisted of only a single or a few bacterial strains. Moreover, the expression of immune genes was linked to the gut microbiome composition, suggesting that the ant host can regulate the microbiome in its gut. CONCLUSIONS:Immune system flare-ups can have negative consequence on gut microbiome diversity, pointing to a previously underrated cost of immunity. Moreover, our results provide important insights into shifts in the molecular regulation of fertility and longevity associated with insect sociality.

SUBMITTER: Negroni MA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7682046 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Immune challenge reduces gut microbial diversity and triggers fertility-dependent gene expression changes in a social insect.

Negroni Matteo Antoine MA Segers Francisca H I D FHID Vogelweith Fanny F Foitzik Susanne S

BMC genomics 20201123 1

<h4>Background</h4>The gut microbiome can influence life history traits associated with host fitness such as fecundity and longevity. In most organisms, these two life history traits are traded-off, while they are positively linked in social insects. In ants, highly fecund queens can live for decades, while their non-reproducing workers exhibit much shorter lifespans. Yet, when fertility is induced in workers by death or removal of the queen, worker lifespan can increase. It is unclear how this ...[more]

PMID: 33225893

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Project description:AbstractSocial behavior can have a major impact on the dynamics of infectious disease outbreaks. For animals that live in dense social groups, such as the eusocial insects, pathogens pose an especially large risk because frequent contacts among individuals can allow rapid spread within colonies. While there has been a large body of work examining adaptations to mitigate the spread of infectious disease within social insect colonies, there has been less work on strategies to prevent the introduction of pathogens into colonies in the first place. We develop an agent-based model to examine the effect of territorial behavior on the transmission of infectious diseases between social insect colonies. We find that by preventing the introduction of infected foreign workers into a colony, territoriality can flatten the curve of an epidemic, delaying the introduction of an infectious disease and reducing its maximum prevalence, but only for diseases with moderate to low transmissibility. Our results have implications for understanding how pathogen risk influences the evolution of territorial behavior in social insects and other highly social animals.Significance statementInfectious disease outbreaks can impose a large fitness cost to animals that live in social groups. The frequency and pattern of contacts both within and among groups can have a large impact on the speed and extent of an epidemic. Using an individual-based model, we examined how the exclusion of foreign workers from a territory around the nest influences disease transmission between social insect colonies. We find that territoriality can protect colonies from outbreaks of low to moderately contagious pathogens by delaying the spillover from other colonies and reducing the maximum number of workers who are infected. These results suggest that the relative threat posed by infectious diseases may have played an important role in shaping the diversity of territorial behaviors seen in different social insect species.Supplementary informationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00265-021-03095-0.

Project description:BACKGROUND:Adoption of thermal processing of the diet drives human evolution and gut microbiota diversity changes in a dietary habit-dependent manner. However, whether thermal processing of food triggers gut microbial variation remains unknown. Herein, we compared the microbiota of non-thermally processed and thermally processed food (NF and TF) and investigated gut microbiota associated with NF and TF in catfish Silurus meridionalis and C57BL/6 mice to assess effects of thermal processing of food on gut microbiota and to further identify the differences in host responses. RESULTS:We found no differences in overall microbial composition and structure in the pairwise NF and TF, but identified differential microbial communities between food and gut. Both fish and mice fed TF had significantly lower gut microbial diversity than those fed NF. Moreover, thermal processing of food triggered the changes in their microbial communities. Comparative host studies further indicated host species determined gut microbial assemblies, even if fed with the same food. Fusobacteria was the most abundant phylum in the fish, and Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes dominated in the mice. Besides the consistent reduction of Bacteroidetes and the balanced Protebacteria, the response of other dominated gut microbiota in the fish and mice to TF was taxonomically opposite at the phylum level, and those further found at the genus level. CONCLUSIONS:Our results reveal that thermal processing of food strongly contributes to the reduction of gut microbial diversity and differentially drives microbial alterations in a host-dependent manner, suggesting specific adaptations of host-gut microbiota in vertebrates responding to thermal processing of food. These findings open a window of opportunity to understand the decline in gut microbial diversity and the community variation in human evolution and provide new insights into the host-specific microbial assemblages associated with the use of processing techniques in food preparation in humans and domesticated animals.

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Immune challenge reduces gut microbial diversity and triggers fertility-dependent gene expression changes in a social insect.

Publications

Immune challenge reduces gut microbial diversity and triggers fertility-dependent gene expression changes in a social insect.

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