Outreach

@misc{nokey,

title = {The honey bee gut microbiome – a diversity profile of different gut parts and seasons across eight European countries},

author = {Nikolas Basler and Dirk C. de Graaf and Lina De Smet and Jelle Matthijnssens},

year  = {2022},

date = {2022-09-20},

urldate = {2022-09-20},

abstract = {As a highly productive pollinator of flowering plants, the honey bee (Apis mellifera) plays an important role in ecology and agriculture. However, managed honey bee colonies are suffering from a number of stressors, including pathogens, parasites, and the use of pesticides. Studying and improving the health of honey bees is therefore of great ecologic and economic interest. Previous studies have shown that the honey bee gut houses a stable bacterial microbiome of only approximately eight core species. On the other hand, recent studies described a higher diversity in bacteria on the sub-species level as well as in bacteriophages (or phages, i.e. viruses that infect bacteria). Additionally, it has been shown that the gut microbiome affects the bees’ development, immune signalling and behaviour. 

This project is part of the EU-funded Innovative Training Network VIROINF (grant agreement No 955974) which revolves around virus-host interactions and aims to facilitate the connections between the fields of virology and bioinformatics. Honey bees from eight different European countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Switzerland and United Kingdom) were collected during spring, summer and autumn 2020 as part of the EU-funded B-GOOD project (grant agreement No 817622). From each sample, midguts, ileums and rectums of 10 individual bees have been pooled and processed to generate Illumina libraries for shotgun sequencing. From the resulting data, the diversity of the microbiome was assessed based on species-level abundances as well as shared fractions of single-nucleotide variations (SNVs) in orthologous core genes within species. Preliminary analysis of the core species abundance profiles suggests that the rectum contains the entire bacterial community, of which ileum and midgut contain nested subsets. Unlike species abundances, SNV profiles within some core species appear to separate by geographic origin. 

These findings will also inform future experiments to gain more insight into the complex interactions between the honey bee, its gut bacteria and their viruses. We thereby aim to contribute to a better understanding of honey bee health and disease.},

howpublished = {Oral presentation at 9th European Congress of Apidology (EurBee9)},

note = {Best Oral Presentation},

keywords = {Project 11, WP 1.1 Virus identification},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {presentation}

}