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PHYLOGENETIC AND FUNCTIONAL DIVERSITY OF SEAGULL AND CANADIAN GEESE FECAL MICROBIAL COMMUNITIES
Citation:
LU, J. AND J. W. SANTO-DOMINGO. PHYLOGENETIC AND FUNCTIONAL DIVERSITY OF SEAGULL AND CANADIAN GEESE FECAL MICROBIAL COMMUNITIES. Presented at 2007 American Society for Microbiology Conference, Toronto, ON, CANADA, May 21 - 25, 2007.
Impact/Purpose:
To inform the public
Description:
In spite of increasing public health concerns on the risks associated with swimming in waters contaminated with waterfowl feces, there is little information on the gut microbial communities of aquatic birds. To address the molecular microbial diversity of waterfowl, 16S rDNA and metagenome clone libraries were analyzed for seagulls and geese fecal samples. Analyses of seagull (283) and geese (319) 16S rDNA clones demonstrated that these communities are diverse. Many sequences were closely related to Catellicoccus marimammalium (i.e., 26% in seagulls and 28% in geese), a novel Gram-positive, catalase-negative bacterium previously isolated from marine mammals. Other bacteria included members of the Clostridia (17% in seagull) and Bacilli (11% in seagulls and 31% in geese) classes, and Gamma proteobacteria (11% in seagulls and 15% in geese). In contrast with mammalian gut systems, only a very small fraction of the 16S rDNA sequences was similar to the Bacteriodetes group. Putative protein-coding sequences (135 in seagulls and 270 in geese) were identified using bioinformatic analysis of seagulls (351) and geese (354) metagenomic clones. A few of the protein-encoding sequences (16) in seagull and a nearly half protein-encoding sequences (134) in geese could be classified into functional groups. Similarity analyses indicated that a significant fraction of the proteins identified in both seagull and geese were highly similar to known proteins observed in Bacilli, Clostridia and Gamma proteobacteria. Eukaryotic-like sequences were also obtained in the seagull metagenomic library while avian viruses and bacterial phage sequences were obtained in Canadian geese library. The results from this study suggest that the gut microbial community structure of waterfowl is relatively different from domesticated animal counterparts, including poultry. dditionally, a rich diversity of functional genes is present in the waterfowl metagenome. These genetic differences might be useful in the development of assays to distinguish seagull and Canadian feces from other fecal sources.