Trends in Parasitology
Volume 32, Issue 12, December 2016, Pages 914-916
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Probiotic Treatment with a Gut Symbiont Leads to Parasite Susceptibility in Honey Bees

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pt.2016.09.005Get rights and content

Gut symbionts are critical for host health and as such might be used as probiotics. In a recent study, Schwarz et al. showed that pretreatment of honey bees with a dominant gut bacterium causes dysbiosis and increases pathogen susceptibility, showing that probiotic applications for animal health can have unwanted effects.

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    Nonetheless, attempts at using biofilm-producing S. alvi wkB2 (core Betaproteobacteria) to exclude protozoan colonization by Lotmaria passim failed and unexpectedly showed that S. alvi wkB2-supplemented individuals have higher protozoan loads, elevated stress markers, and decreased expression of key detoxification genes compared with nontreated controls [12]. Some have speculated that the co-occurring increase in G. apicola abundance during supplementation (likely due to S. alvi-mediated cross feeding [6]) could have been the driving force behind these observations [93]. However, a simpler explanation is that the excess S. alvi, and associated increase in G. apicola, were directly consumed by L. passim, similar to the observation of bacterivorous protozoans preferentially grazing on Beta- and Gamma-proteobacteria species in soil [94].

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    In addition, on day 7, the absolute abundances of core honeybee gut bacterial species such as Lactobacillus Firm-5 and Bombella apis were significantly reduced in response to thiacloprid exposure in a dose-dependent manner. Lactobacillus Firm-5 is important for processing food and resisting pathogenic bacteria such as Crithidia (Schmidt and Engel, 2016). These results strongly suggest that thiacloprid not only affected the absolute abundance of honeybee gut microbiota but also significantly reduced the abundance of two of ten honeybee gut core bacterial species.

  • Honey bee gut dysbiosis: a novel context of disease ecology

    2017, Current Opinion in Insect Science
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    These six species clusters comprise the core gut bacteria, a robust ecosystem integrated with host physiology [7•,8,9••,10]. While the evenness of the gut community has been proposed as a measure of healthy host physiology [11], healthy or ‘core’ community structure is an ongoing argument, because studies vary in their approaches [12], and community structure seems to alter predictably with adult age (Figure 1). Despite this variation, next generation sequencing (16S amplicons) of whole worker guts of Apis mellifera from around the world are remarkably consistent in structure and membership, providing strong insights into the core gut bacterial community [8,13].

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