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Volume 169, Issue 10

Ontogeny drives shifts in skin bacterial communities in facultatively paedomorphic salamanders Open Access

Abstract

Microbiomes are major determinants of host growth, development and survival. In amphibians, host-associated bacteria in the skin can inhibit pathogen infection, but many processes can influence the structure and composition of the community. Here we quantified the shifts in skin-associated bacteria across developmental stages in the striped newt (), a threatened salamander species with a complex life history and vulnerable to infection by the amphibian chytrid fungus and ranavirus. Our analyses show that pre-metamorphic larval and paedomorphic stages share similar bacterial compositions, and that the changes in the microbiome coincided with physiological restructuring during metamorphosis. Newts undergoing metamorphosis exhibited microbiome compositions that were intermediate between paedomorphic and post-metamorphic stages, further supporting the idea that metamorphosis is a major driver of host-associated microbes in amphibians. We did not find support for infection-related disruption of the microbiome, though infection replicates were small for each respective life stage.

  • Received:
  • Accepted:
  • Published Online:
Keyword(s): amphibians , chytrid , development , microbiome and paedomorphosis
Funding
This study was supported by the:
  • National Science Foundation (Award IOS-2011278)
    • Principle Award Recipient: AnaV. Longo
© 2023 The Authors
  • This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. This article was made open access via a Publish and Read agreement between the Microbiology Society and the corresponding author’s institution.
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2023-10-10
2025-03-25
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/content/journal/micro/10.1099/mic.0.001399
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Ontogeny drives shifts in skin bacterial communities in facultatively paedomorphic salamanders
Microbiology 169, 001399 (2023); https://doi.org/10.1099/mic.0.001399
/content/journal/micro/10.1099/mic.0.001399
/content/journal/micro/10.1099/mic.0.001399
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