Abstract
Animal-microbe symbioses are often stable for millions of years. An example is the clade consisting of social corbiculate bees—honeybees, bumblebees, and stingless bees—in which a shared ancestor acquired specialized gut bacteria that subsequently diversified with hosts. This model may be incomplete, however, as few microbiomes have been characterized for stingless bees, which are diverse and ecologically dominant pollinators in the tropics. We surveyed gut microbiomes of Brazilian stingless bees, focusing on the genus Melipona, for which we sampled multiple species and biomes. Strikingly, Melipona lacks Snodgrassella and Gilliamella, bacterial symbionts ubiquitous in other social corbiculate bees. Instead, Melipona species harbor more environmental bacteria and bee-specific Starmerella yeasts. Loss of Snodgrassella and Gilliamella may stem from ecological shifts in Melipona or the acquisition of new symbionts as functional replacements. Our findings demonstrate the value of broadly sampling microbiome biodiversity and show that even ancient symbioses can be lost.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the UFV, the financial support from CNPq, CAPES – Finance Code 001 and FAPEMIG, a USDA NIFA postdoctoral fellowship (2018-08156) to TJH, and NIH award R35GM131738 to NAM. We thank Marina Cunha, Gil Viana, José Souza, Eduardo Ferreira, Leandro Campos, Marcelo Silva, Antônio Alves, Sidcley de Lucena, Flávio Yamamoto, Hilton Gomes, Kalhil França, Gilvan Santos and Helder Resende for providing bees, and Fernando da Silveira for Amazonian bees identification.
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Cerqueira, A.E.S., Hammer, T.J., Moran, N.A. et al. Extinction of anciently associated gut bacterial symbionts in a clade of stingless bees. ISME J 15, 2813–2816 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-021-01000-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-021-01000-1
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