We just had our paper on temporal dynamics of meerkat gut microbiomes out in Nat Comms and I'm just super stoked about this one! Three years work, including finding the samples (they were spread across the world), getting them Germany, and then figuring out how to incorporate an internal standard so that we could estimate ratios of bacterial load. This bit took a lot of trial runs to get the concentrations right and was massively facilitated by our very competent lab manager, Kerstin Wilhelm. Read the paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26298-5.
0 Comments
I've been working with PhD student Priscilla Alpizar on some bat gut microbiome data she collected in Costa Rica, and the paper has just been published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution in their special issue on the impact of anthropogenic change on animal microbiomes (link to paper here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.746783/full).
This was a fun paper to work on and it yielded interesting results. Whilst intensive agriculture is generally known to have negative effects on biodiversity, in this context the crop was banana, whose flowers provide a nectar food source for nectar-feeding bat species. Therefore, some nectar-feeding bats, including the Pallas's long-tongued bat studied by Pri, often forage in these intensive plantations. Is this a good thing? A bad thing? Are these plantations acting as ecological traps? It is conceivable that insecticides used in these monocultures have direct (chemical pollution) and indirect (reduce diet diversity and nutrition) effects on bat health, even though they are providing a nectar food source. It should be noted that whilst this species is largely nectar feeding, they are actually omnivorous and also feed on invertebrates. I wrote an opinion piece called 'Applying the core microbiome to understand host-microbe systems', which I was luckily enough to publish in one of my fave journals, Journal of Animal Ecology. This idea stemmed from a discussion with reviewers of a paper I had submitted, where each of the reviewers and editors had a very specific (and often different) idea of what the core microbiome meant. The core microbiome has traditionally pertained to what are likely to be functional microbes within a microbial community, but given with a bit of imagination we can link almost any trait to 'function' (commonness, stability, keystoneness, etc), as well as the fact that 'function' has numerous definitions (although these can be split into two major conceptual groups, as nicely summarized by Klaassen 2018), this has lead to the concept of the core microbiome being extremely widely applied (at least in ecological fields), yet not very well defined. This lack of definition makes it relatively unpopular with pure microbiologists, I believe, who apply it far less frequently than ecologists, and generally think of the core in terms of functional genes rather than key taxonomic units. I had a look through the host-microbe special issues of Molecular Ecology and Journal of Animal Ecology from 2018 before I wrote the piece, and found 14 articles, out of all published across the two special issues, applied or referred to the core microbiome. I reckon that was about a third of all papers.
|