Toad's survivability and soil microbiome alterations impacted via individual abundance.

Abstract

Artificial breeding is a valid strategy for the reverse of current extinction tendency in wild population of amphibian like toads. Considering public health, an alternative to antibiotics is demanded for ameliorating survival of toads during the culture period. Relying on the cognition of probiotics or antagonistic bacteria, the present work investigated viability and soil microorganism variations induced by distribution characteristic on toads using high-throughput sequencing technology. Comparison and analysis of soil metagenome from clustered and depopulated groups distinguished by toad behavior showed differences of bacterial community composition (e.g., Proteobacteria bacterium TMED72 and Nannocystis exedens) and antibiotic resistance genes involving antibiotic efflux and inactivation (e.g., mdtB and acrF). There were 18 and 10 distribution-typical genes independently enriched in Proteobacteria bacterium TMED72 and bacterium TMED88 of clustered group and Nannocystis exedens of depopulated group. In Nannocystis exedens, one of the distribution-typical genes was annotated as 6-phosphogluconate dehydrogenase acting role on bacterial growth restriction. It implied that, compared with the group emerging rare traces, the reduction of soil bacteria which possess genes retarding bacterial growth putatively impairs competitiveness to pathogenic bacteria and results in poor survivability of toads under clustering behavior. With the co-occurrence of virulence genes, more evidences are needed on the antagonistic bacteria Nannocystis exedens as antibiotic substitute.