Intergenerational Transfer of Persistent Bacterial Communities in Female Nile Tilapia

12 pages, 6 figures, supplementary material https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2022.879990/full#supplementary-material.-- Data Availability Statement: The data presented in this study are deposited in the repository, Sequence Read Archive (SRA) with accession number PRJNA808265

Resident microbial communities that can support various host functions play a key role in their development and health. In fishes, microbial symbionts are vertically transferred from the parents to their progeny. Such transfer of microbes in mouthbrooder fish species has not been reported yet. Here, we employed Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) to investigate the vertical transmission of microbes across generations using a 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing approach, based on the presence of bacteria in different generations. Our analysis revealed that the core microbiome in the buccal cavity and posterior intestine of parents shapes the gut microbiome of the progeny across generations. We speculate that the route of this transmission is via the buccal cavity. The identified core microbiome bacteria, namely Nocardioides, Propionibacterium, and Sphingomonas have been reported to play an essential role in the health and development of offspring. These core microbiome members could have specific functions in fish, similar to mammals

This study was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (grant agreement no. 683210), the Research Council of Norway under the Toppforsk Programme (grant agreement no. 250548/F20), and the Faculty of Biosciences and Aquaculture (Nord University, Norway) (grant no. 224000-124)

Peer reviewed