昆虫肠道微生物分离培养策略及研究进展

The strategies of isolation of insect gut microorganisms

摘要:

昆虫肠道作为一种特殊生境，生存着多种多样的共生微生物，并且肠道内的很多微生物与自然界其他生境的微生物种类显著不同。基于对纯培养微生物的研究，科学家们发现，肠道微生物与昆虫营养、生长发育及免疫等功能密切相关。因此，分离培养是发现微生物新种类、新基因和新功能的基础。然而，自然界可培养的微生物大约只占总数的1%。为了能够对更多的微生物进行分离和培养，近二十年来，微生物学家们发展了诸多新的培养技术和策略并利用它们从昆虫肠道分离出了很多新的难培养微生物。这些新的微生物种类极大地丰富了我们对肠道共生微生物生理作用与功能的认识。以此为基础，本文综述了昆虫肠道微生物分离培养的策略及研究进展，并对未来该领域的发展进行了展望。

Abstract:

Insects are the most diverse and abundant group of animals in nature. They are highly adaptive and play important roles in various ecological environments. As a special microbial niche, the intestinal tracts of insects offer habitats for diverse symbiotic microorganisms, many of which are different from those originated from the other environments. Studies based on pure cultures show that the symbiotic microbes are associated with insect nutrition, development and immunity, etc. Therefore, isolation pure cultures are the basis for the discovery of new microorganisms, new genes and new functions. However, up to now, only about 1% of microorganisms in nature are cultivable. To solve this problem, microbiologists have put great efforts to develop many new culture techniques and strategies during the past two decades. With the use of these new strategies, many uncultured microbes have been successfully isolated, which greatly enriched our understanding of the physiological functions of symbiotic microorganisms. In this paper we reviewed the latest advances of the novel strategies used for the cultivation of symbiotic microorganisms in insect guts, as well as the future perspective of this field.