Life history strategies complement niche partitioning to support the coexistence of closely related Gilliamella species in the bee gut

The maintenance of bacterial diversity at both species- and strain-levels is crucial for the sustainability of honey bee gut microbiota and host health. Periodic or random fluctuation in diet typically alters the metabolic niches available to gut microbes, thereby continuously reshaping bacterial diversity and interspecific interactions. It remains unclear how closely related bacteria adapt to these fluctuations and maintain coexistence within the bee gut. Here, we demonstrate that the five predominant Gilliamella species associated with Apis cerana, a widely distributed Asiatic honey bee, have diverged in carbohydrate metabolism to adapt to distinct nutrient niches driven by dietary fluctuation. Specifically, the glycan-specialists gain improved growth on a pollen-rich diet, but are overall inferior in competition to non-glycan-specialist on either a simple sugar or sugar-pollen diet, when co-inoculated in the bee host and transmitted across generations. Strikingly, despite of their di..., , , # Life history strategies complement niche partitioning to support the coexistence of closely related *Gilliamella* species in the bee gut

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cnp5hqcdv](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cnp5hqcdv)

## Description of the data and file structure

This repository is associated with Yang C, Han B, Tang J, Hu J, Qiu L, Cai W, Zhou X, Zhang X, Life history strategies complement niche partitioning to support the coexistence of closely related Gilliamella species in the bee gut, The ISME Journal, 2025; wraf016, [https://doi.org/10.1093/ismejo/wraf016](https://doi.org/10.1093/ismejo/wraf016)

This repository contains the raw data necessary to produce all associated figures behind the publication.

### Files and variables

#### File: FigureData.xlsx

**Description:** This files contains all raw data for the figures in the main text and supplementary materials. Each sheet in the file is named after the figure of which it contains the raw data. 

##### Varia...