Daniel D. Sprockett1, Jeffrey D. Price2, Anthony F. Juritsch2, Robert J. Schmaltz2, Madalena V. F. Real1, Samantha Goldman1, Michael Sheehan3, Amanda E. Ramer-Tait2, Andrew H. Moeller1*
- Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University; Ithaca, New York, USA.
- Department of Food Science and Technology and the Nebraska Food for Health Center, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Lincoln, NE, USA.
- Laboratory for Animal Social Evolution and Recognition, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell University; Ithaca, New York, USA.
* Corresponding author. Email: andrew.moeller@cornell.edu
Abstract: Mammalian species harbor compositionally distinct gut microbial communities, but the mechanisms that maintain specificity of symbionts to host species remain unclear. Here we show that natural selection within house mice (Mus musculus domesticus) drives deterministic assembly of the house-mouse gut microbiota from mixtures of native and non-native microbiotas. Competing microbiotas from wild-derived lines of house mice and other mouse species (Mus and Peromyscus spp.) within germ-free wildtype (WT) and Rag1 knockout (Rag1-/-) house mice revealed widespread fitness advantages for native gut bacteria. Native bacterial lineages significantly outcompeted non-native lineages in both WT and Rag1-/- mice, indicating home-site advantage for native microbiota independent of host adaptive immunity. However, a minority of native Bacteriodetes and Firmicutes favored by selection in WT hosts were not favored or disfavored in Rag1-/- hosts, indicating that Rag1 mediates fitness advantages of these strains. This study demonstrates home-site advantage for native gut bacteria, consistent with local adaptation of gut microbiota to their mammalian species.
NOTE:
The R markdown file CU01_Figures.Rmd contains all of the R code necessary to recreate the main and supplemental figures for this manuscript. The Data directory contains all of the necessary data files. Figure 3 was rendered in iToL v6.
