Geographic patterns in the bacterial microbiome of the glassy-winged sharpshooter, Homalodisca vitripennis (Hemiptera: Cicadellidae)

Numerous environmental and physiological factors influence the composition of the bacterial microbiome inhabiting an insect. Pyrosequencing of bacterial 16S rRNA sequences was used to identify bacterial taxa inhabiting 50 Homalodisca vitripennis collected from nine Texas vineyards collected during the summer of 2007. After quantifying distances between insects based on differences in bacterial community composition, it was clear that the geographical locations of the insects collected had a substantial influence on their internal bacterial microbiota composition. There was a clear tendency for insects collected from the same vineyard to cluster in principal component analyses using said distances. A single bacterial species, Candidatus Baumannia cicadellinicola, a primary endosymbiont, represented the majority of bacteria sampled. Many of the more common bacterial genera contain a majority of species known previously to inhabit soil and plants exclusively, suggesting that the insect’s environment is a major source of abundant species of microflora. Many of the bacterial genera sampled had significant positive correlations with other bacteria, and many of these correlations were between genera with the same order.