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Comparative Study
. 2021 Dec 22;9(3):e0069621.
doi: 10.1128/Spectrum.00696-21. Epub 2021 Nov 24.

Selective Bacterial Community Enrichment between the Pitcher Plants Sarracenia minor and Sarracenia flava

Affiliations
Comparative Study

Selective Bacterial Community Enrichment between the Pitcher Plants Sarracenia minor and Sarracenia flava

Scott M Yourstone et al. Microbiol Spectr. .

Abstract

The interconnected and overlapping habitats present in natural ecosystems remain a challenge in determining the forces driving microbial community composition. The cuplike leaf structures of some carnivorous plants, including those of the family Sarraceniaceae, are self-contained ecological habitats that represent systems for exploring such microbial ecology questions. We investigated whether Sarracenia minor and Sarracenia flava cultivate distinct bacterial communities when sampled at the same geographic location and time. This sampling strategy eliminates many abiotic environmental variables present in other studies that compare samples harvested over time, and it could reveal biotic factors driving the selection of microbes. DNA extracted from the decomposing detritus trapped in each Sarracenia leaf pitcher was profiled using 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing. We identified a surprising amount of bacterial diversity within each pitcher, but we also discovered bacteria whose abundance was specifically enriched in one of the two Sarracenia species. These differences in bacterial community representation suggest some biotic influence of the Sarracenia plant on the bacterial composition of their pitchers. Overall, our results suggest that bacterial selection due to factors other than geographic location, weather, or prey availability is occurring within the pitchers of these two closely related plant species. This indicates that specific characteristics of S. minor and S. flava may play a role in fostering distinct bacterial communities. These confined, naturally occurring microbial ecosystems within Sarracenia pitchers may provide model systems to answer important questions about the drivers of microbial community composition, succession, and response to environmental perturbations. IMPORTANCE This study uses amplicon sequencing to compare the bacterial communities of environmental samples from the detritus of the leaf cavities of Sarracenia minor and Sarracenia flava pitcher plants. We sampled the detritus at the same time and in the same geographic location, eliminating many environmental variables present in other comparative studies. This study revealed that different species of Sarracenia contain distinct bacterial members within their pitchers, suggesting that these communities are not randomly established based on environmental factors and the prey pool but are potentially enriched for by the plants' chemical or physical environment. This study of these naturally occurring, confined microbial ecosystems will help further establish carnivorous pitcher plants as a model system for answering important questions about the development and succession of microbial communities.

Keywords: Sarracenia; bacterial genomics; microbial communities; microbiome; pitcher plants.

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Figures

FIG 1
FIG 1
Initial sampling and community profiling of pitcher plant detritus. After sampling the detritus of both (A) Sarracenia minor (left) and Sarracenia flava (right), the bacterial communities were profiled using the 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing with the number of reads collected from each sample ranging between 1 × 105 and 8 × 105 reads per pitcher. The 16S rRNA reads were then compared to known genetic sequences to determine (B) the relative abundance of different bacterial phylogenetic classes within each pitcher.
FIG 2
FIG 2
Identification of differentially expressed OTUs using a negative binomial generalized linear model. Using this model, we (A) identified the OTUs within our two pitcher plant species that are differentially expressed (α < 0.05), while also considering the number of samples in which they are represented. (B) Pie charts of the differentially expressed OTUs indicate that Gammaproteobacteria are enriched across most of the S. minor pitchers, while Alphaproteobacteria and Clostridia are enriched across a large portion of the S. flava pitchers. (C) Representative normalized count box plots of some of the most differentially expressed OTUs (with their taxonomic family) visually confirms that these OTUs are enriched between the two pitcher plant species.

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