The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Īnimals contain complex bacterial communities in their guts that can impact health status –. The sequences of SAGs B02, J21, I20, O02, O11, P14, and P17 are deposited in Genbank under accession numbers JAIM00000000, AVQL00000000, JAIN00000000, JAIL00000000, JAIK00000000, JACG00000000, and JAIO00000000.įunding: This work was funded by Yale University, Swiss NSF postdoctoral fellowship PBBSP3-135986 and EMBO fellowship ALTF 1317-2011 (to PE), and the US NSF Dimension of Biodiversity Award 10461605 (to NAM). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: The authors confirm that all data underlying the findings are fully available without restriction.

Richardson, MicroTrek Incorporated, United States of America Therefore, important dimensions of microbial diversity are not evident from analyses of 16S rRNA, and single cell genomics has potential to elucidate processes of bacterial diversification.Ĭitation: Engel P, Stepanauskas R, Moran NA (2014) Hidden Diversity in Honey Bee Gut Symbionts Detected by Single-Cell Genomics. Our results show that, despite minimal divergence at 16S rRNA genes, in situ diversification occurs within gut communities and generates bacterial lineages with distinct ecological niches. Furthermore, gene repertoires differ markedly among strains in both species, implying distinct metabolic capabilities. In both species, the divergence of 16S rRNA loci appears to have been curtailed by frequent recombination within populations, while other genomic regions have continuously diverged. For both species, our analyses revealed extensive variation in intraspecific divergence of protein-coding genes but uniformly high levels of 16S rRNA similarity. Here, we used single-cell genomics to study the variation within two species of the bee gut microbiota: Gilliamella apicola and Snodgrassella alvi. The gut microbiota of the honey bee, Apis mellifera, presents a useful model, because it consists of a small number of characteristic bacterial species, each showing signs of diversification. Microbial communities in animal guts are composed of diverse, specialized bacterial species, but little is known about how gut bacteria diversify to produce genetically and ecologically distinct entities.

After Bees by B.C. Nyren