Speaker

Holly Bik, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Dept. of Marine Sciences, U. of Georgia

Stories from a single worm: searching for novel symbioses in marine nematodes

Abstract

In marine ecosystems, bacterial symbionts are known to influence the development and environmental adaptation of host organisms. However, our knowledge of symbiosis in microbial metazoan taxa (animal species <1mm such as nematodes, tardigrades, kinorhynchs, etc.) remains poor due to the small size of these taxa and labor-intensive labwork required for such studies. Nematode worms represent an ideal case study for exploring patterns of symbiosis in microbial metazoa. In benthic ecosystems worldwide, marine nematodes occur in high abundance and exhibit high species richness, and scattered observational reports of novel symbioses have been reported from nematodes in recent years. In this talk, I will discuss my lab’s recent work to broadly characterize marine nematode holobionts, using single-worm genome skimming and reconstruction of bacterial Metagenome-Assembled Genomes (MAGs). This discovery-based work has also leveraged high-throughput culturing approaches adapted from studies of pelagic bacteria, whereby host-associated isolate cultures can be used to develop new experimental approaches for studying novel marine symbioses.