Probing the functional significance of wild animal microbiomes using omics data

Worsley, Sarah F., Videvall, Elin, Harrison, Xavier A., Björk, Johannes R., Mazel, Florent and Wanelik, Klara M. (2024) Probing the functional significance of wild animal microbiomes using omics data. Functional Ecology, 38 (11). pp. 2329-2349. ISSN 0269-8463

Preview

PDF (Worsley_etal_2024_FunctionalEcology) - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

Host-associated microbiomes are thought to play a key role in host physiology and fitness, but this conclusion mainly derives from systems biased towards animal models and humans. While many studies on non-model and wild animals have characterised the taxonomic diversity of their microbiomes, few have investigated the functional potential of these microbial communities. Functional ‘omics’ approaches, such as metagenomics, metatranscriptomics and metabolomics, represent promising techniques to probe the significance of host-associated microbiomes in the wild. In this review, we propose to (1) briefly define the main available functional omics tools along with their strengths and limitations, (2) summarise the key advances enabled by omics tools to understand microbiome function in human and animal models, (3) showcase examples of how these methods have already brought invaluable insights into wild host microbiomes and (4) provide guidelines on how to implement these tools to address outstanding questions in the field of wild animal microbiomes. To conclude, we suggest that, building on knowledge derived from cheaper, more traditional approaches (e.g. 16S metabarcoding and qPCR), functional omics tools represent a promising approach to test hypotheses regarding the ecological and evolutionary significance of the resident microbiota in wild animals. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Funding Information: This manuscript evolved from a symposium at the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) Congress in Prague, 2022 and a special topic network (Wild Animal Microbiomes and Evolution) funded by ESEB. SFW was funded by the Natural Environmental Research Council (NE/S010939/1) and a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship (ECF-2023-433). EV was funded by the Swedish Research Council (2020-00259). XAH was funded by the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2020-320). FM was funded by the University of Lausanne. KMW was funded by a University of Surrey Future Fellowship.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	culturomics,metabolomics,metagenomics,metaproteomics,metatranscriptomics,microbiome function,multi-omics,wild host,ecology, evolution, behavior and systematics ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1100/1105
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Biological Sciences
Related URLs:	http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	28 Nov 2024 01:37
Last Modified:	28 Nov 2024 01:37
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/97796
DOI:	10.1111/1365-2435.14650

Downloads

Actions (login required)

View Item