A niche-adapted brain microbiome in salmonids at homeostasis

Abstract

Ectotherms have long been known to have peculiar relationships with microorganisms. For instance, bacteria can be recovered from blood and internal organs of healthy teleost fish. However, until now, the presence of a microbial community in the healthy teleost brain has not been proposed. Here we report a living bacterial community in the brain of healthy salmonids. Brain bacterial loads in salmonids are comparable to those found in the spleen and 1000-fold lower than in the gut. Brain bacterial communities share >50% of their diversity with gut and blood bacterial communities. Using culturomics, we obtained 54 bacterial isolates from the brain of healthy rainbow trout. Comparative genomics uncovered unique niche adaptations associated with brain colonization and polyamine biosynthesis. In a natural system, salmonid brain microbiomes shift with the host life cycle, becoming dysbiotic in reproductively mature Chinook salmon, a species that undergoes reproductive death. Our study redefines the relationship between the teleost brain and bacterial microbiomes under physiological conditions. We posit that this symbiosis may endow salmonids with a direct mechanism to sense and respond to environmental microbes. One-Sentence SummarySalmonids have a brain-adapted, resident bacterial community