Bacterial community of a spider, Marpiss magister (Salticidae)

Lihua Zhang, Guimin Zhang, Yueli Yun, Yu Peng

Arthropods are associated with various microorganisms which confer benefits to their hosts. Recently, research has been conducted on bacterial communities of insects to provide an insight into the potential interactions of the symbiotic bacteria and their hosts. Spiders are interesting to study as they are perceived to be natural enemies of pests. The effect of endosymbionts on spiders has been reported, but little is known about the overall bacterial communities present in spiders. Here, we report on the characterization of bacterial communities present in the whole body of the spider Marpiss magister using Illumina sequencing of 16S rRNA amplicons. Our study shows that the most abundant phyla of bacteria included Proteobacteria, Tenericutes, Bacteroidetes and Actinobacteria. At the genus level, the most abundant genera included Rickettsia, Wolbachia, Spiroplasma, and Cardinium. Besides these dominant endosymbionts, our study also showed the existence of bacteria in the genera Arthrobacter, Novosphingobium, Acinetobacter, Pseudomonas, Aquabacterium and Sphingomonas at an abundance ranging from 0.65 to 0.84%, and the existence of bacterial in genera Lactobacillus, Sphingobium, Methylobacterium, Bradyrhizobium, Propionibacterium, Brevundimonas, Achromobacter, Microbacterium, Corynebacterium, and Flavobacterium at a slightly lower abundance ranging from 0.1 to 0.5%. Therefore, our finding indicates that endosymbionts are not the only microbiota present in the spider M. magister, and other bacterial taxa also exist in its bacterial community.