engleski

Epibiotic Microbial Diversity of Mediterranean Loggerhead Sea Turtles

Loggerhead sea turtles carry diverse, often unique epibionts, and several species of barnacles, red algae or amphipods, known to inhabit only sea turtle shells. However, studies of epibiotic microbial communities of sea turtles are generally scarce and focused mainly on morphological analyses of sea turtle-associated metazoans and diatoms. On the other hand, sea turtle microbiome studies are largely limited to those exploring the endobiotic gut, oral and cloacal microbial communities. The current research aims to characterize both prokaryotic and eukaryotic microorganisms associated with the carapace and skin of 26 loggerhead sea turtles from Ionian and Adriatic Seas, sampled in different seasons during 2018 and 2019. To investigate the overall microbial diversity and composition, amplicon sequencing of the 16S and 18S rRNA genes was performed using the Illumina MiSeq Platform. Data were analyzed using the QIIME 2 pipeline, while SILVA and PR2 were used as reference databases for prokaryotes and eukaryotes, respectively. Most abundant detected prokaryotic phyla were Proteobacteria and Bacteroidota, while eukaryotic microbes were mostly represented by TSAR (Alveolata and Stramenopila). Our findings show that overall microbial communities differed among sampling locations (Adriatic vs. Ionian Sea) and sampling seasons, while prokaryotic communities differed significantly between sampled body parts (carapace vs. skin). This research is the first to describe prokaryotic and eukaryotic component of epibiotic microbiome of loggerhead sea turtles using amplicon sequencing. Additionally, this study supports the claim that sea turtle epibiotic microbiota is a reservoir of vast variety microbial species.

microbiome, epizoic, Caretta caretta, metabarcoding, 16S, 18S

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