Bacterial diversity associated with Streblidae flies parasitizing cave-dwelling bats from northeastern Brazil
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Updated: Nov 2, 2026

Tissue Collection of Bats for -Omics Analyses and Primary Cell Culture
Published on: October 23, 2019
Victória Valente Califre de Mello1, Michelli Inácio Gonçalves Funnicelli1, Eder Barbier2
1Vector-Borne Bioagents Laboratory (VBBL), Department of Pathology, Reproduction and One Health, São Paulo State University (UNESP), School of Agricultural and Veterinary Sciences, Jaboticabal, SP 14884-900, Brazil.
Abstract:
Bats (Chiroptera) are highly diverse mammals that play key ecological roles and harbor a wide range of microorganisms, yet the microbiome of their ectoparasitic flies remains poorly understood. This study characterized and compared the bacterial microbiomes associated with two bat-ectoparasite systems, Pteronotus gymnonotus-Trichobius johnsonae and Desmodus rotundus-Trichobius parasiticus, from cave-dwelling bat populations in northeastern Brazil using 16S rRNA gene sequencing. Sixty-eight bat fly samples were successfully sequenced, and 67 were retained for downstream ecological analyses after quality filtering. Bacterial communities were dominated by members of the classes Gammaproteobacteria and Alphaproteobacteria, with Arsenophonus, Bartonella, and unresolved endosymbiont-associated taxa among the most abundant bacterial groups. Alpha-diversity patterns varied according to the metric considered: observed ASV richness was influenced by bat fly species, sex, and their interaction, Shannon diversity differed according to streblid fly species and sex, and Faith's phylogenetic diversity differed between bat fly sexes. Notably, male T. johnsonae exhibited greater observed ASV richness than females, whereas no significant sex difference was detected in T. parasiticus. Beta-diversity analyses consistently revealed differences in bacterial community composition between the two bat-ectoparasite systems, while the influence of sex was system-dependent, with significant differentiation between T. johnsonae males and females but not between sexes of T. parasiticus in phylogenetically informed analyses. Differential abundance analysis further identified Romboutsia, Bartonella, Bacteroides, and an unclassified Pseudomonadota genus as discriminatory taxa among groups. Overall, these findings reveal distinct bacterial diversity and composition patterns between the two bat-ectoparasite systems and indicate that sex-associated microbiome variation is not uniform across bat fly species.
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