Stability of microbiota facilitated by host immune regulation: informing probiotic strategies to manage amphibian disease.

ABSTRACT: Microbial communities can augment host immune responses and probiotic therapies are under development to prevent or treat diseases of humans, crops, livestock, and wildlife including an emerging fungal disease of amphibians, chytridiomycosis. However, little is known about the stability of host-associated microbiota, or how the microbiota is structured by innate immune factors including antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) abundant in the skin secretions of many amphibians. Thus, conservation medicine including therapies targeting the skin will benefit from investigations of amphibian microbial ecology that provide a model for vertebrate host-symbiont interactions on mucosal surfaces. Here, we tested whether the cutaneous microbiota of Panamanian rocket frogs, Colostethus panamansis, was resistan

SUBMITTER: Kung D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3906108 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature