Division of functional roles for termite gut protists revealed by single-cell transcriptomes.

The ISME Journal
Yuki NishimuraM Ohkuma

Abstract

The microbiome in the hindgut of wood-feeding termites comprises various species of bacteria, archaea, and protists. This gut community is indispensable for the termite, which thrives solely on recalcitrant and nitrogen-poor wood. However, the difficulty in culturing these microorganisms has hindered our understanding of the function of each species in the gut. Although protists predominate in the termite gut microbiome and play a major role in wood digestion, very few culture-independent studies have explored the contribution of each species to digestion. Here, we report single-cell transcriptomes of four protists species comprising the protist population in worldwide pest Coptotermes formosanus. Comparative transcriptomic analysis revealed that the expression patterns of the genes involved in wood digestion were different among species, reinforcing their division of roles in wood degradation. Transcriptomes, together with enzyme assays, also suggested that one of the protists, Cononympha leidyi, actively degrades chitin and assimilates it into amino acids. We propose that C. leidyi contributes to nitrogen recycling and inhibiting infection from entomopathogenic fungi through chitin degradation. Two of the genes for chitin deg...Continue Reading

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Datasets Mentioned

BETA
PRJDB8546

Methods Mentioned

BETA
Illumina sequencing

Software Mentioned

BLASTX
dbCAN2
Hiseq
KAAS
Trimmomatic
BLASTP
BLAST
MiSeq
ImageJ
Trinity

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