Data from: The hindgut-lumen prokaryotic microbiota of the lignocellulose-degrading termite Reticulitermes flavipes and its responses to dietary lignocellulose composition

Reticulitermes flavipes (Isoptera: Rhinotermitidae) is a highly eusocial
insect that thrives on recalcitrant lignocellulosic diets through
nutritional symbioses with gut-dwelling prokaryotes and eukaryotes. In the
R. flavipes hindgut, there are up to 12 eukaryotic protozoan symbionts;
the number of prokaryotic symbionts has been estimated in the hundreds.
Despite its biological relevance, this diverse community, to date, has
been investigated only by culture- and cloning-dependent methods.
Moreover, it is unclear how termite gut microbiomes respond to diet
changes and what roles they play in lignocellulose digestion. This study
utilized high-throughput 454 pyrosequencing of 16S V5-V6 amplicons to
sample the hindgut lumen prokaryotic microbiota of R. flavipes and to
examine compositional changes in response to lignin-rich and lignin-poor
cellulose diets after a 7-day feeding period. Of the ~475 000 high-quality
reads that were obtained, 99.9% were annotated as bacteria and 0.11% as
archaea. Major bacterial phyla included Spirochaetes (24.9%),
Elusimicrobia (19.8%), Firmicutes (17.8%), Bacteroidetes (14.1%),
Proteobacteria (11.4%), Fibrobacteres (5.8%), Verrucomicrobia (2.0%),
Actinobacteria (1.4%) and Tenericutes (1.3%). The R. flavipes hindgut
lumen prokaryotic microbiota was found to contain over 4761 species-level
phylotypes. However, diet-dependent shifts were not statistically
significant or uniform across colonies, suggesting significant
environmental and/or host genetic impacts on colony-level microbiome
composition. These results provide insights into termite gut microbiome
diversity and suggest that (i) the prokaryotic gut microbiota is much more
complex than previously estimated, and (ii) environment, founding
reproductive pair effects and/or host genetics influence microbiome
composition.