Probiotic consortia are not uniformly effective against different amphibian chytrid pathogen isolates
Abstract
Symbiotic bacterial communities can protect their hosts from infection by pathogens.
Treatment of wild individuals with protective bacteria (probiotics) isolated
from hosts can combat the spread of emerging infectious diseases. However, it is
unclear whether candidate probiotic bacteria can offer consistent protection across
multiple isolates of globally distributed pathogens. Here, we use the lethal amphibian
fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis to investigate whether probiotic
richness (number of bacteria) or genetic distance among consortia members influences
broad-scale in vitro inhibitory capabilities of probiotics across multiple isolates
of the pathogen. We show that inhibition of multiple pathogen isolates by individual
bacteria is rare, with no systematic pattern among bacterial genera in ability to inhibit
multiple B. dendrobatidis isolates. Bacterial consortia can offer stronger protection
against B. dendrobatidis compared to single strains, and this tended to be more
pronounced for consortia containing multiple genera compared with those consisting
of bacteria from a single genus (i.e., with lower genetic distance), but critically,
this effect was not uniform across all B. dendrobatidis isolates. These novel insights
have important implications for the effective design of bacterial probiotics to
mitigate emerging infectious diseases
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10394/26706https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.14456
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/mec.14456