ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Microbiol.
Sec. Microbial Symbioses
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2025.1614492
Biotype and host relatedness influence the composition of bacterial microbiomes in Schizaphis graminum aphids
Provisionally accepted
- 1Crop Production and Pest Control Research, Agricultural Research Service (USDA), West Lafayette, United States
- 2Department of Entomology, College of Agriculture, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, United States
- 3Department of Botany and Plant Pathology, College of Agriculture, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, United States
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The microbiome of greenbug aphid (Schizaphis graminum (Rondani)) was investigated in regard to greenbug biotypes E and K, on four dates after infestation, and with 17 host cultivars belonging to five host plant species, namely wheat, barley, rye, sorghum, and the goatgrass Aegilops triuncialis. The V5-V7 hypervariable region of 16S rDNA was PCR amplified, Illumina sequenced, and aligned to a curated database of bacterial 16S rDNA sequences. The almost universal intracellular endosymbiont of aphids, Buchnera aphidicola, comprised 78.24 to 99.99% of the read counts among samples, largely because of its high copy number of genomes per bacteroid. Abundant non-Buchnera genera included Pseudomonas, Rhodanobacter, Massilia, and Enterobacter. Read counts of eight of 78 examined genera were more than 90% restricted to a single replicate of a single treatment. Shannon entropy was highest in biotype K and on the barley host, but it did not vary significantly among dates post infestation.Unweighted UniFrac distances most significantly varied with biotype, host plant species, infestation time, and almost all of their interactions. Weighted UniFrac and Jaccard distances varied less significantly. By counts of differentially populated genera, the factors biotype, host plant species, infestation time, and host plant resistance genes to greenbug, were consecutively less important. Functional analysis with PICRUSt2 illustrated a diminution of respiratory electron transport and long-chain fatty acids in the Buchnera endosymbiont, reflecting adaptation to an intracellular environment.
Keywords: Schizaphis graminum, RNA-Seq, microbiome, 16S, Gut microflora, symbiont
Received: 01 May 2025; Accepted: 11 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Crane, Crane, Webb and Schemerhorn. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Brandon J Schemerhorn, Crop Production and Pest Control Research, Agricultural Research Service (USDA), West Lafayette, United States
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