Fig. 4.

Longitudinal metagenomic sequencing of the microbiome of queen-worker pairs along with the nest development. (a) We sampled queen-worker paired samples from nests belonging to three age periods: newly established nests (New) with egg-laying queens and their first batch of emerged workers (1-day old); early stage of nests were sampled when the first batch of color-labeled workers were 15-day old; late stage of nests are about 45-day old since the foundation of the nest, and then a batch of newly born workers were labeled and collected after 15 days. (b) Bar plots showing the relative abundance of the species clusters in paired metagenomic samples from three replicate nests. (c) Bray-Curtis dissimilarity PCoA based on the gut community composition described at the species cluster level. Boxplots (bottom panel) show the distribution of each stage of nest development along the first principal coordinate (PCo1). (d) Bray-Curtis dissimilarity of species cluster-level composition profiles of worker-worker, queen-worker, and queen-queen paired samples from the same or different nests over time. (e) Strain-level phylogenomic tree of the “Gilli-Bom-4” species cluster based on the concatenated alignments of consensus-alleles found in the core-genome