Freshwater Vertebrate Animal Metagenomics, Alligatorinae

Synonyms

American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) gut microbiome; Reptile GI tract bacterial communities

Definition

The American alligator is host to a distinct suite of bacterial communities, endemic to specific regions along the gastrointestinal tract, and distinct from all other vertebrates studied to date.

Introduction

The vast majority of life on Earth is prokaryotic, inhabiting a great diversity of ecological niches from deep-sea hydrothermal vents to metazoans’ digestive tracts. The vertebrate gut represents a “world within worlds” (Ley et al. 2008a), shaped by complex coevolutionary relationships between the vertebrate host and the resident symbiotic, and occasionally pathogenic, bacterial communities, the diversity of which is only beginning to be explored. Previous studies of vertebrate-associated bacteria, relying principally on culture-based methods, aimed to identify specific disease-causing agents. With the advent of molecular approaches in the mid 1990s, a new...