Digital Commons Network^™

A Microbiome Analysis Of The Relationship Among Crayfish Ectosymbionts And Their Environment, John Hoverson

Senior Honors Theses

The purpose of this project was to determine if there are differences present between the α-diversities of the crayfish microbiome and its surrounding water and sediment. Furthermore, this project sought to discover if these differences hold when microbiomes are evaluated between crayfish of first and second stream orders. Finally, this project sought to determine if the presence of branchiobdellidan ectosymbionts on the crayfish caused further differences in the crayfish microbiome. While the hypothesized patterns between crayfish, ectosymbionts, and stream order were not found to exist, a significantly different microbiome was observed between water, sediment, and crayfish, and the α-diversity of …

The Roles Of Host Species, Geographic Scale And Environmental Stressors In Shaping The Composition Of Coral Microbiomes, Alicia Marie Riegel Parker

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Reef-building corals are long-lived and may take many centuries to adapt, making them especially susceptible to climate change. However, corals host microbial symbionts that can change quickly, potentially speeding acclimation. My dissertation aimed to determine the degree of coevolution and flexibility between corals and their microbiomes among hosts, across space, and in response to stress.

Microbial communities are usually surveyed by sequencing the 16S rRNA gene, however the PCR primers used also amplify coral DNA, thereby limiting prokaryotic read coverage. To mitigate this contamination, I designed a peptide nucleic acid clamp that increased the recovery of bacterial reads by 2-11x …

Gut Microbiomes Of Sympatric Amazonian Wood-Eating Catfishes (Loricariidae) Reflect Host Identity And Little Role In Wood Digestion, Mark Mccauley, Donovan P. German, Nathan K. Lujan, Colin R. Jackson

Faculty and Student Publications

© 2020 The Authors. Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Neotropical wood-eating catfishes (family Loricariidae) can occur in diverse assemblages with multiple genera and species feeding on the same woody detritus. As such, they present an intriguing system in which to examine the influence of host species identity on the vertebrate gut microbiome as well as to determine the potential role of gut bacteria in wood digestion. We characterized the gut microbiome of two co-occurring catfish genera and four species: Panaqolus albomaculatus, Panaqolus gnomus, Panaqolus nocturnus, and Panaque bathyphilus, as well as that of submerged wood …

Preliminary Microbiome Analysis Of Freshwater Bivalves From Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge, Dechen Edwards

2020 Symposium Posters

Eukaryotic hosts and their associated microbes exhibit variable relationships. Some are driven by well-documented benefits including microbial contributions to host digestion; others are less understood. In this project, we seek to understand how a host’s microbiome is differentiated from the surrounding, free-living microbial community and whether this process is altered by the presence of pollution. Here we present a protocol developed for the extraction, isolation, and identification of the microbial population found in freshwater “fingernail” clams (Sphaeriidae) based on modified methods from the Earth Microbiome Project and studies of freshwater amphibian and marine bivalve microbiomes. We first developed …