Microbiomes of the Sydney Rock Oyster are acquired through both vertical and horizontal transmission.

BACKGROUND: The term holobiont is widely accepted to describe animal hosts and their associated microorganisms. The genomes of all that the holobiont encompasses, are termed the hologenome and it has been proposed as a unit of selection in evolution. To demonstrate that natural selection acts on the hologenome, a significant portion of the associated microbial genomes should be transferred between generations. Using the Sydney Rock Oyster (Saccostrea glomerata) as a model, we tested if the microbes of this broadcast spawning species could be passed down to the next generation by conducting single parent crosses and tracking the microbiome from parent to offspring and throughout early larval stages using 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. From each cross, we sampled adult tissues (mantle, gill, stomach, gonad, eggs or sperm), larvae (D-veliger, umbo, eyed pediveliger, and spat), and the surrounding environment (water and algae feed) for microbial community analysis. RESULTS: We found that each larval stage has a distinct microbiome that is partially influenced by their parental microbiome, particularly the maternal egg microbiome. We also demonstrate the presence of core microbes that are consistent across all families, persist throughout early life stages (from eggs to spat), and are not detected in the microbiomes of the surrounding environment. In addition to the core microbiomes that span all life cycle stages, there is also evidence of environmentally acquired microbial communities, with earlier larval stages (D-veliger and umbo), more influenced by seawater microbiomes, and later larval stages (eyed pediveliger and spat) dominated by microbial members that are specific to oysters and not detected in the surrounding environment. CONCLUSION: Our study characterized the succession of oyster larvae microbiomes from gametes to spat and tracked selected members that persisted across multiple life stages. Overall our findings suggest that both horizontal and vertical transmission routes are possible for the complex microbial communities associated with a broadcast spawning marine invertebrate. We demonstrate that not all members of oyster-associated microbiomes are governed by the same ecological dynamics, which is critical for determining what constitutes a hologenome.

Determining the Composition of Resident and Transient Members of the Oyster Microbiome.

To better understand how complex microbial communities become assembled on eukaryotic hosts, it is essential to disentangle the balance between stochastic and deterministic processes that drive their assembly. Deterministic processes can create consistent patterns of microbiome membership that result in persistent resident communities, while stochastic processes can result in random fluctuation of microbiome members that are transient with regard to their association to the host. We sampled oyster reefs from six different populations across the east coast of the United States. At each site we collected gill tissues for microbial community analysis and additionally collected and shipped live oysters to Northeastern University where they were held in a common garden experiment. We then examined the microbiome shifts in gill tissues weekly for 6 weeks using 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. We found a strong population-specific signal in the microbial community composition of field-sampled oysters. Surprisingly, the oysters sampled during the common garden experiment maintained compositionally distinct gill-associated microbial communities that reflected their wild population of origin, even after rearing them in a common garden for several weeks. This indicates that oyster gill-associated microbiota are predominantly composed of resident microbes specific to host population, rather than being a reflection of their immediate biotic and abiotic surroundings. However, certain bacterial taxa tended to appear more frequently on individuals from different populations than on individuals from the same population, indicating that there is a small portion of the gill microbiome that is transient and is readily exchanged with the environmental pool of microbes. Regardless, the majority of gill-associated microbes were resident members that were specific to each oyster population, suggesting that there are strong deterministic factors that govern a large portion of the gill microbiome. A small portion of the microbial communities, however, was transient and moved among oyster populations, indicating that stochastic assembly also contributes to the oyster gill microbiome. Our results are relevant to the oyster aquaculture industry and oyster conservation efforts because resident members of the oyster microbiome may represent microbes that are important to oyster health and some of these key members vary depending on oyster population.

Fine-scale transition to lower bacterial diversity and altered community composition precedes shell disease in laboratory-reared juvenile American lobster.

The American lobster Homarus americanus supports a valuable commercial fishery in the Northeastern USA and Maritime Canada; however, stocks in the southern portion of the lobster's range have shown declines, in part due to the emergence of shell disease. Epizootic shell disease is a bacterially induced cuticular erosion that renders even mildly affected lobsters unmarketable because of their appearance, and in more severe cases can cause mortality. Despite the importance of this disease, the associated bacterial communities have not yet been fully characterized. We sampled 2 yr old, laboratory-reared lobsters that displayed signs of shell disease at the site of disease as well as at 0.5, 1, and 1.5 cm away from the site of disease to determine how the bacterial community changed over this fine spatial scale. Illumina sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene revealed a distinct bacterial community at the site of disease, with significant reductions in bacterial diversity and richness compared to more distant sampling locations. The bacterial community composition 0.5 cm from the site of disease was also altered, and there was an observable decrease in bacterial diversity and richness, even though there were no signs of disease at that location. Given the distinctiveness of the bacterial community at the site of disease and 0.5 cm from the site of disease, we refer to these communities as affected and transitionary, and suggest that these bacteria, including the previously proposed causative agent, Aquimarina 'homaria', are important for the initiation and progression of this laboratory model of shell disease.