Dietary Resilience of Termite Gut Microbiota

Previous studies suggest that changes in diet can lead to rapid, but often reversible, shifts in termite gut microbial communities. However, most of this research has focused on a limited number of species, and little is known about the flexibility of gut microbiota and associated enzymatic traits in neotropical termites with contrasting diets. In this project, we investigated how gut microbiota structure and enzymatic function respond to dietary manipulation in two neotropical termitids, Silvestritermes euamignathus, a polyphagous species with a broad feeding repertoire, including litter, wood, and the carton nest of other termites, and Cornitermes cumulans, a litter specialist.