The interplay between host-specificity and habitat-filtering influences sea cucumber microbiota across an environmental gradient of pollution

作者：Sheena Suet-Wah Chung, Khan Cheung, Bovern Suchart Arromrak, Zhenzhen Li, Cham Man Tse, Juan Diego Gaitán‐Espitía · 发表于：Environmental Microbiome · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1186/s40793-024-00620-2 · 被引用次数：8 · 研究领域：Echinoderm biology and ecology、Seaweed-derived Bioactive Compounds、Marine Bivalve and Aquaculture Studies

Environmental gradients can influence morpho-physiological and life-history differences in natural populations. It is unclear, however, to what extent such gradients can also modulate phenotypic differences in other organismal characteristics such as the structure and function of host-associated microbial communities. In this work, we addressed this question by assessing intra-specific variation in the diversity, structure and function of environmental-associated (sediment and water) and animal-associated (skin and gut) microbiota along an environmental gradient of pollution in one of the most urbanized coastal areas in the world. Using the tropical sea cucumber Holothuria leucospilota, we tested the interplay between deterministic (e.g., environmental/host filtering) and stochastic (e.g., random microbial dispersal) processes underpinning host-microbiome interactions and microbial assemblages. Overall, our results indicate that microbial communities are complex and vary in structure and function between the environment and the animal hosts. However, these differences are modulated by the level of pollution across the gradient with marked clines in alpha and beta diversity. Yet, such clines and overall differences showed opposite directions when comparing environmental- and animal-associated microbial communities. In the sea cucumbers, intrinsic characteristics (e.g., body compartments, biochemistry composition, immune systems), may underpin the observed intra-individual diff...