Microbiota fingerprints within the oral cavity of cetaceans as indicators for population biomonitoring

• Published in: Scientific Reports
• Main Authors: Soares-Castro, Pedro, Araújo-Rodrigues, Helena, Godoy-Vitorino, Filipa, Ferreira, Marisa, Covelo, Pablo, López, Alfredo, Vingada, José, Eira, Catarina, Santos, P. M.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Nature Research 2019
• Subjects: Animals; Biological Monitoring; Cetacea; DNA Barcoding; Taxonomic; Microbiota; Mouth; Ciências Naturais::Ciências Biológicas; Science & Technology; Bia; Sobral; Phocoena phocoena
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/73224; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-50139-7

The composition of mammalian microbiota has been related with the host health status. In this study, we assessed the oral microbiome of 3 cetacean species most commonly found stranded in Iberian Atlantic waters (Delphinus delphis, Stenella coeruleoalba and Phocoena phocoena), using 16S rDNA-amplicon metabarcoding. All oral microbiomes were dominated by Proteobacteria, Firmicutes, Bacteroidetes and Fusobacteria bacteria, which were also predominant in the oral cavity of Tursiops truncatus. A Constrained Canonical Analysis (CCA) showed that the major factors shaping the composition of 38 oral microbiomes (p-value < 0.05) were: (i) animal species and (ii) age class, segregating adults and juveniles. The correlation analysis also grouped the microbiomes by animal stranding location and health status. Similar discriminatory patterns were detected using the data from a previous study on Tursiops truncatus, indicating that this correlation approach may facilitate data comparisons between different studies on several cetacean species. This study identified a total of 15 bacterial genera and 27 OTUs discriminating between the observed CCA groups, which can be further explored as microbiota fingerprints to develop (i) specific diagnostic assays for cetacean population conservation and (ii) bio-monitoring approaches to assess the health of marine ecosystems from the Iberian Atlantic basin, using cetaceans as bioindicators. The authors would like to acknowledge to Jorg Becker and Joao Sobral for the sequencing services provided at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia. This work was supported by the project CetSenti RECI/AAGGLO/0470/2012 (FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-027472), by the strategic program UID/BIA/04050/2013 (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007569), by the GenomePT project (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-022184), supported by COMPETE 2020 -Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation (POCI), Lisboa Portugal Regional Operational Programme (Lisboa2020), Algarve Portugal Regional Operational Programme (CRESC Algarve2020), ...