Parental care has evolved to increase offspring fitness. Burying beetles, which breed on small vertebrate carcasses, engage in extensive parental care, including prehatch carcass preservation using oral and anal secretions and direct posthatch care by regurgitating food for offspring. Aspects of parental care, such as regurgitation, may also act as a means of transmitting beneficial microbes to offspring. To explore the contributions of parental care to microbial transmission, we used Illumina high-throughput sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene to characterize bacterial communities found on prepared carcasses and in the digestive tracts of wild-caught and laboratory-reared adults and in the digestive tracts of larvae that either received or did not receive parental care. We found that the digestive tract bacterial communities of larvae receiving parental care were similar to those of their parents, whereas digestive tract bacterial communities of larvae not receiving parental care were dissimilar to those of their parents. All larval digestive tract bacterial communities were dissimilar from those found on prepared carcasses. Furthermore, we found that the digestive tract bacterial communities did not differ significantly between wild-caught nonreproductive adults and F1 and F2 laboratory-reared nonreproductive adults or between laboratory-reared nonreproductive and reproductive adults. While previous work showed that a prepared carcass may serve to inoculate some larval digestive tract bacteria, the results of the present study suggest that this role may be relatively minor and that parental care is crucial in shaping the gut microbiome of offspring, with aspects of this care, such as parental regurgitation, likely being an important component of the transmission process. Furthermore, as wild-reared and laboratory-reared adults did not vary significantly in their digestive tract bacterial communities, our findings suggest that gut microbiome transmittance within our Nicrophorus defodiens model is likely germane to the natural system.

父母的照顾已经发展为增加后代的适应性。在小型脊椎动物尸体上繁殖的埋藏甲虫会进行广泛的父母照料，包括使用口腔和肛门分泌物进行孵化前preservation体保存，以及通过对后代进行反刍食物直接进行孵化后照料。父母关怀方面，例如反流，也可以作为将有益微生物传播给后代的一种手段。为了探究父母照料对微生物传播的贡献，我们使用了Illumina的16S rRNA基因高通量测序来表征在准备的car体，野外捕获的和实验室饲养的成年人的消化道以及消化道中发现的细菌群落。接受或未接受父母照料的幼虫。我们发现，接受父母照料的幼虫的消化道细菌群落与其父母相似，而未接受父母照料的幼虫的消化道细菌群落与父母相似。所有的幼虫消化道细菌群落都与准备的尸体上的细菌群落不同。此外，我们发现野生捕捞的非生殖成年人与F1和F2实验室饲养的非生殖成年人之间或实验室饲养的非生殖和生殖成年人之间的消化道细菌群落没有显着差异。尽管先前的工作表明准备好的尸体可以用来接种一些幼虫消化道细菌，本研究的结果表明，这种作用可能相对较小，父母的照顾对于塑造后代的肠道微生物组至关重要，而这种照顾的方面，例如父母的反流，很可能是传播过程的重要组成部分。此外，由于野生饲养的和实验室饲养的成年人的消化道细菌群落没有显着差异，因此我们的发现表明我们肠道内的微生物组透过率Nicrophorus defodiens模型可能与自然系统密切相关。