Captivity and the co-diversification of great ape microbiomes.

Wild great apes harbor clades of gut bacteria that are restricted to each host species. Previous research shows the evolutionary relationships among several host-restricted clades mirror those of great-ape species. However, processes such as geographic separation, host-shift speciation, and host-filtering based on diet or gut physiology can generate host-restricted bacterial clades and mimic patterns of co-diversification across host species.

A great-ape view of the gut microbiome.

Humans assemble a specialized microbiome from a world teeming with diverse microorganisms. Comparison to the microbiomes of great apes provides a dimension that is indispensable to understanding how these microbial communities form, function and change. This evolutionary perspective exposes not only how human gut microbiomes have been shaped by our great-ape heritage but also the features that make humans unique, as exemplified by an expansive loss of bacterial and archaeal diversity and the identification of microbial lineages that have co-diversified with their hosts.

Rates of gut microbiome divergence in mammals.

The variation and taxonomic diversity among mammalian gut microbiomes raises several questions about the factors that contribute to the rates and patterns of change in these microbial communities. By comparing the microbiome compositions of 112 species representing 14 mammalian orders, we assessed how host and ecological factors contribute to microbiome diversification. Except in rare cases, the same bacterial phyla predominate in mammalian gut microbiomes, and there has been some convergence of microbiome compositions according to dietary category across all mammalians lineages except Chiropterans (bats), which possess high proportions of Proteobacteria and tend to be most similar to one another regardless of diet.

Metabolism of Toxic Sugars by Strains of the Bee Gut Symbiont Gilliamella apicola.

Unlabelled: Social bees collect carbohydrate-rich food to support their colonies, and yet, certain carbohydrates present in their diet or produced through the breakdown of pollen are toxic to bees. The gut microbiota of social bees is dominated by a few core bacterial species, including the Gram-negative species Gilliamella apicola We isolated 42 strains of G. apicola from guts of honey bees and bumble bees and sequenced their genomes.