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Higher Variability in Fungi Compared to Bacteria in the Foraging Honey Bee Gut

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Abstract

Along with bacteria, fungi can represent a significant component of animal- and plant-associated microbial communities. However, we have only begun to describe these fungi, much less examine their effects on most animals and plants. Bacteria associated with the honey bee, Apis mellifera, have been well characterized across different regions of the gut. The mid- and hindgut of foraging bees house a deterministic set of core species that affect host health, whereas the crop, or the honey stomach, harbors a more diverse set of bacteria that is highly variable in composition among individual bees. Whether this contrast between the two regions of the gut also applies to fungi remains unclear despite their potential influence on host health. In honey bees caught foraging at four sites across the San Francisco Peninsula of California, we found that fungi were less distinct in species composition between the crop and the mid- and hindgut than bacteria. Unlike bacteria, fungi varied substantially in species composition throughout the honey bee gut, and much of this variation could be predicted by the location where we collected the bees. These observations suggest that fungi may be transient passengers and unimportant as gut symbionts. However, our findings also indicate that honey bees could be vectors of infectious plant diseases as many of the fungi we found in the honey bee gut are recognized as plant pathogens.

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Data Availability

Raw sequence data are openly available in the Sequence Read Archives of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), accession number: PRJNA775827. URL: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bioproject/PRJNA775827

Code Availability

Upon acceptance, code will be made available on Dryad Digital Repository.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Megan Morris for advice on DNA extraction, sequencing, and data analysis. We also thank Callie Chappell, Nick Hendershot, Jesse Miller, Chih-Fu Yeh, and two anonymous reviewers for comments.

Funding

This work was funded by NSF (DEB 1737758). CED was supported by the Stanford Summer Research Program.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, Stanford University, 371 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA, 48109-1085, USA

    Leslie E. Decker, Priscilla A. San Juan, Magdalena L. Warren, Cory E. Duckworth & Tadashi Fukami

  2. Department of Biology, University of North Georgia, 159 Sunset Dr, Health and Natural Sciences Building, Dahlonega, GA, 30597, USA

    Cory E. Duckworth

  3. Department of Biological Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, 4249 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA, 15260, USA

    Cory E. Duckworth

  4. Department of Plant & Microbial Biology, University of California, Berkeley, 321 Koshland Hall, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA

    Cheng Gao

  5. State Key Laboratory of Mycology, Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101, China

    Cheng Gao

Authors
  1. Leslie E. Decker
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  2. Priscilla A. San Juan
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  3. Magdalena L. Warren
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  4. Cory E. Duckworth
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  5. Cheng Gao
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  6. Tadashi Fukami
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Contributions

LED, PAS, CED, MLW, and TF designed the study, and LED, PAS, CED, and MLW collected samples. LED and CG analyzed data, and LED wrote the first draft of the manuscript. All authors contributed to editing the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Leslie E. Decker.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Decker, L.E., San Juan, P.A., Warren, M.L. et al. Higher Variability in Fungi Compared to Bacteria in the Foraging Honey Bee Gut. Microb Ecol 85, 330–334 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-021-01922-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-021-01922-5

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