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Food Storage by the Savanna Termite Cornitermes cumulans (Syntermitinae): a Strategy to Improve Hemicellulose Digestibility?

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Abstract

It has been suggested that food storage inside the nest may offer termites with a nutritional provision during low resource availability. Additionally, feces employed as construction material provide an excellent environment for colonization by microorganisms and, together with the storage of plant material inside the nest, could thus provide some advantage to the termites in terms of lignocellulose decomposition. Here, we conducted for the first time a comprehensive study of the microbial communities associated to a termite exhibiting food storage behavior using Illumina sequencing of the 16S and (ITS2) regions of rRNA genes, together with enzymatic assays and data collected in the field. Cornitermes cumulans (Syntermitinae) stored grass litter in nodules made from feces and saliva located in the nest core. The amount of nodules increased with nest size and isolation, and interestingly, the soluble fraction of extracts from nodules showed a higher activity against hemicellulosic substrates compared to termite guts. Actinobacteria and Sordariales dominated microbial communities of food nodules and nest walls, whereas Spirochetes and Pleosporales dominated gut samples of C. cumulans. Within Syntermitinae, however, gut bacterial assemblages were dissimilar. On the other hand, there is a remarkable convergence of the bacterial community structure of Termitidae nests. Our results suggest that the role of nodules could be related to food storage; however, the higher xylanolytic activity in the nodules and their associated microbiota could also provide C. cumulans with an external source of predigested polysaccharides, which might be advantageous in comparison with litter-feeding termites that do not display food storage behavior.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Johana Rincones, Tiago Carrijo, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on the manuscript. We would like to acknowledge the CTBE-NGS facility at the Brazilian Bioethanol Science and Technology Laboratory for provision of time and technical support.

Funding

This study was supported by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), grant # 2015/21497-6 (A. A.), and the Minas Gerais State Agency for Research and Development – FAPEMIG, grant # CRA-APQ-00878-12 (A. A. and V. X. S.). L. M. was supported by a master degree grant from the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES).

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  1. Letícia Menezes, Thabata Maria Alvarez, and Gabriela Félix Persinoti made equal contributions as first authors.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Biologia, Instituto de Biociências, Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP), Rio Claro, SP, Brazil

    Letícia Menezes & Ana Maria Costa-Leonardo

  2. Universidade Positivo, Curitiba, PR, Brazil

    Thabata Maria Alvarez

  3. Laboratório Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia do Bioetanol (CTBE), Centro Nacional de Pesquisa em Energia e Materiais, Campinas, SP, Brazil

    Thabata Maria Alvarez, Gabriela Félix Persinoti, João Paulo Franco & Douglas Antonio Alvaredo Paixão

  4. Programa em Processos Tecnológicos e Ambientais, Universidade de Sorocaba (UNISO), Sorocaba, SP, Brazil

    Fábio Squina

  5. CCNH—Center for Natural Sciences and Humanities, Federal University of ABC (UFABC), Santo André, SP, Brazil

    Edimar Agnaldo Moreira & Alberto Arab

  6. Instituto de Ciências da Natureza, Universidade Federal de Alfenas, Alfenas, MG, Brazil

    Vinícius Xavier da Silva

  7. Department of Food Technology, School of Food Engineering, University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Campinas, SP, Brazil

    Maria Teresa Pedrosa Silva Clerici

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Menezes, L., Alvarez, T.M., Persinoti, G.F. et al. Food Storage by the Savanna Termite Cornitermes cumulans (Syntermitinae): a Strategy to Improve Hemicellulose Digestibility?. Microb Ecol 76, 492–505 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-017-1128-2

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