Kasie Raymann

University of North Carolina at Greensboro | UNCG · Department of Biology

Antibiotic use in apiculture is often necessary to ensure the survival of honey bee colonies. However, beekeepers are faced with the dilemma of needing to combat bacterial brood infections while knowing that antibiotics also kill beneficial bacteria important for bee health. In recent years, bee probiotics have become increasingly purchased by beek...

Background Sand flies vector several human pathogens, including Leishmania species, which cause leishmaniases. A leishmaniasis vaccine does not yet exist, so the most common prevention strategies involve personal protection and insecticide spraying. However, insecticides can impact non-target organisms and are becoming less effective because of the...

Background Honey bees are not only essential for pollination services, but are also economically important as a source of hive products (e.g., honey, royal jelly, pollen, wax, and propolis) that are used as foods, cosmetics, and alternative medicines. Royal jelly is a popular honey bee product with multiple potential medicinal properties. To boost...

Sand fly larvae develop in sheltered humid habitats containing decaying organic matter on which they feed. Previously, we showed that gravid females of Phlebotomus papatasi Scopoli (Diptera: Psychodidae) are attracted to and stimulated to lay eggs on larval rearing medium containing larvae. That study, however, did not control for the possible effe...

Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are subject to many infections and infestations caused by a broad range of organisms including mites, beetles, moths, fungi, bacteria, and viruses. These pests and diseases can severely impact colony health and, if untreated, can lead to colony loss. Because of the significance of honey bees to agricultural production, m...

The core genome represents the set of genes shared by all, or nearly all, strains of a given population or species of prokaryotes. Inferring the core genome is integral to many genomic analyses, however, most methods rely on the comparison of all the pairs of genomes; a step that is becoming increasingly difficult given the massive accumulation of...

The factors driving fine-scale composition and dynamics of gut microbial communities are poorly understood. In this study, we used metagenomic amplicon deep sequencing to decipher the strain dynamics of two key members of the honey bee gut microbiome. Using this high-throughput and cost-effective approach, we were able to confirm results from previ...

Purpose of Review Host-associated microbiomes can play key roles in the health of animals and plants, but fundamental aspects of the dynamics and evolution of microbial communities are not fully understood. Recent Findings Several recent studies have sequenced and analyzed the entire diversity of microbial species and strains in different host-ass...

Although few honey bee diseases are known to be caused by bacteria, pathogens of adult worker bees may be underrecognized due to social immunity mechanisms. Specifically, infected adult bees typically abandon the hive or are removed by guards. Serratia marcescens, an opportunistic pathogen of many plants and animals, is often present at low abundan...

Significance Increased mortality of honey bee colonies has been attributed to several factors but is not fully understood. The herbicide glyphosate is expected to be innocuous to animals, including bees, because it targets an enzyme only found in plants and microorganisms. However, bees rely on a specialized gut microbiota that benefits growth and...

Accumulating evidence suggests that pesticides have played a role in the increased rate of honey bee colony loss. One of the most commonly used pesticides in the United States is the neonicotinoid imidacloprid. Although the primary mode of action of imidacloprid is on the insect nervous system, it has also been shown to cause changes in insects' di...

The role of the gut microbiome in animal health has become increasingly evident. Unlike most other insects, honey bees possess a highly conserved and specialized core gut microbiome, which consists of nine bacterial species and is acquired mostly through social transmission. Five of these species are ubiquitous in honey bees and are also present in...

The gut microbiome plays a key role in animal health, and perturbing it can have detrimental effects. One major source of perturbation to microbiomes, in humans and human-associated animals, is exposure to antibiotics. Most studies of how antibiotics affect the microbiome have used amplicon sequencing of highly conserved 16S rRNA sequences, as in a...

Gut microbiomes play crucial roles in animal health, and shifts in the gut microbial community structure can have detrimental impacts on hosts. Studies with vertebrate models and human subjects suggest that antibiotic treatments greatly perturb the native gut community, thereby facilitating proliferation of pathogens. In fact, persistent infections...

Effects of tetracycline treatment on relative abundances for bacterial species in which treatment had a significant effect. * = P<0.05, ** = P<0.001, Wilcoxon rank sum tests. See S1 Data for relative abundance data. (PDF)

Relative and absolute abundance data for hive recovery bees. (XLSX)

Number of OTUs at 99% identity threshold for each taxon. (XLSX)

Stats for Fig 5D. (XLSX)

Survival counts for Serratia infection experiment (non age-controlled workers). (XLSX)

Absolute and relative abundance data for lab sterile recovery bees. (XLSX)

Effects of tetracycline treatment on absolute abundances of five bacterial groups, on Day 3, Day 5, and Day 7 post-treatment. Boxplots show shifts in abundance, as estimated by qPCR, at at least one time point post-treatment. A-B) Two core bee gut bacteria (Alpha 2.1 and Frischella) decreased in abundance following tetracycline treatment, C) The en...

Effects of tetracycline treatment on gut microbiome composition of bees kept in laboratory growth chambers, at Days 3, 5, and 7 post-treatment. A) Stacked column graphs showing the absolute abundances (qPCR adjusted for rRNA gene copy number) of bacterial species for bees kept in the sterile experimental condition at Day 3 (treatment n = 9, control...

Screen for fungi in hive recovery bees. A) Percent of hive experiment bees positive for fungi based on diagnostic PCR with universal fungal primers at Days 0, 3, 5, and 7 post-treatment. On Day 0 none of the samples were positive for fungi. On Day 3, four treatment bees (26%) were positive for fungi, and on Day 5 eight treatment bees (53%) were pos...

Number of 16S rRNA operons per genome for each of the bacteria detected in this study. (PDF)

Day three survival counts for Fig 2A and S2A–S2D Fig. (XLSX)

Survival counts for Serratia infection experiment (age-controlled workers). (XLSX)

Sample information. (XLSX)

Alpha and beta diversity data for S9 Fig. (XLSX)

Effects of tetracycline treatment on survivorship, presented as the total number and percent of bees surviving on Day 3 post-treatment. A) Number of bees recovered from hive experiment 2. B) Survivorship in lab exposed recovery experiment. C) Survivorship in lab sterile recovery experiment bees. D) Survivorship in lab germ-free bees. *** = P<0.0001...

The average relative abundances of bacterial species present in control and treatment bees at Days 3, 5, and 7 post-treatment. See S1 Data for relative abundance data. (PDF)

Principal coordinate analysis. Principal coordinate analysis (weighted and unweighted Unifrac) of the gut microbiome composition in control and treatment bees kept in A-B) the sterile experimental condition or C-D) the exposed experimental condition at Days 0, 3, 5, and 7 post-treatment. See S14 Data for alpha and beta diversity data. (PDF)

Stats for Fig 5B. (XLSX)

Absolute and relative abundance data for lab exposed recovery bees. (XLSX)

Effects of tetracycline treatment on relative abundances of the eight core gut bacteria. A) Stacked column graphs showing the relative abundances of bee gut bacterial species in control bees (n = 14) and treatment bees (n = 15) after five days of tetracycline treatment (Day 0 post-treatment), see Dataset S7 for sample details. B) Boxplots showing t...

Alpha and beta diversity data for Fig 3. (XLSX)

Stats for Fig 6B. (XLSX)

Survival counts for immunity challange experiment. (XLSX)

Effects of tetracycline treatment on absolute abundances of five members of the core bee gut community, on Day 3, Day 5, and Day 7 post-treatment. Boxplots show that tetracycline exposure lowered abundances of these groups, as estimated by qPCR, at all time points post-treatment. A) Bifidobacterium, B) Lactobacillus Firm-5, C) Lactobacillus Firm-4,...

Archaea are habitual residents of the human gut flora but are detected at substantially lower frequencies than bacteria. Previous studies have indicated that each human harbors very few archaeal species. However, the low diversity of human-associated archaea that has been detected could be due to the preponderance of bacteria in these communities,...

Archaea were confused with bacteria, under the term prokaryotes, until their originality was recognized in 1977 by Carl Woese and his collaborators of the “Urbana school”. The classification of all cellular organisms into three domains based on rRNA was later confirmed by comparative genomic analyses that have shown that most universal proteins exi...

Significance An archaeal origin for eukaryotes is an exciting recent finding. Nevertheless, it has been based largely on the reconstruction of universal trees. The use of an alternative strategy based on markers shared between Archaea and eukaryotes and Archaea and Bacteria bypasses potential problems linked to the analysis of the three domains sim...

Plasmids from Euryarchaeota, Page 1 of 2 Abstract Many plasmids have been described in Euryarchaeota, one of the three major archaeal phyla, most of them in salt-loving haloarchaea and hyperthermophilic Thermococcales. These plasmids resemble bacterial plasmids in terms of size (from small plasmids encoding only one gene up to large megaplasmids)...

Subsurface microbial life contributes significantly to biogeochemical cycling, yet it remains largely uncharacterized, especially its archaeal members. This 'microbial dark matter' has been explored by recent studies that were, however, mostly based on DNA sequence information only. Here, we use diverse techniques including ultrastuctural analyses...

It is widely accepted that there exist an evolutionary relationship between Archaea and Eukaryotes, but the exact nature of this relationship is hotly debated. In this thesis I have taken advantage of the large available genomic data to investigate the issue through two complementary phylogenomic approaches: (i) the analysis of a specific archaeal...

Background A seventh order of methanogens, the Methanomassiliicoccales, has been identified in diverse anaerobic environments including the gastrointestinal tracts (GIT) of humans and other animals and may contribute significantly to methane emission and global warming. Methanomassiliicoccales are phylogenetically distant from all other orders of m...

Type II DNA topoisomerases are divided into two families, IIA and IIB. Types IIA and IIB enzymes share homologous B subunits encompassing the ATP-binding site, but have non-homologous A subunits catalyzing DNA cleavage. Type IIA topoisomerases are ubiquitous in Bacteria and Eukarya, whereas members of the IIB family are mostly present in Archaea an...

The archaeal machinery responsible for DNA replication is largely homologous to that of eukaryotes and is clearly distinct from its bacterial counterpart. Moreover, it shows high diversity in the various archaeal lineages, including different sets of components, heterogeneous taxonomic distribution, and a large number of additional copies that are...

Bacteria and eukaryotes are involved in many types of interaction in nature, with important ecological consequences. However, the diversity, occurrence, and mechanisms of these interactions often are not fully known. The obligate bacterial endosymbionts of Paramecium provide their hosts with the ability to kill sensitive Paramecium strains through...