Honey bees harbor a diverse gut virome engaging in nested strain-level interactions with the microbiota.

ABSTRACT

The honey bee gut microbiota influences bee health and has become an important model to study the ecology and evolution of microbiota-host interactions. Yet, little is known about the phage community associated with the bee gut, despite its potential to modulate bacterial diversity or to govern important symbiotic functions. Here we analyzed two metagenomes derived from virus-like particles, analyzed the prevalence of the identified phages across 73 bacterial metagenomes from individual bees, and tested the host range of isolated phages. Our results show that the honey bee gut virome is composed of at least 118 distinct clusters corresponding to both temperate and lytic phages and representing novel genera with a large repertoire of unknown gene functions. We find that the phage community is prevalent in honey bees across space and time and targets the core members of the bee gut microbiota. The large number and high genetic diversity of the viral clusters seems to mirror the high extent of strain-level diversity in the bee gut microbiota. We isolated eight lytic phages that target the core microbiota member Bifidobacterium asteroides, but that exhibited different host ranges at the strain level, resulting in a nested interaction network of coexisting phages and bacterial strains. Collectively, our results show that the honey bee gut virome consists of a complex and diverse phage community that likely plays an important role in regulating strain-level diversity in the bee gut and that holds promise as an experimental model to study bacteria-phage dynamics in natural microbial communities.