Physico-Chemical Aspects and Complete Bacterial Community Composition Analysis of Wasp Nests

Chaolin Fang and Varenyam Achal
Additional contact information
Chaolin Fang: Environmental Engineering Program, Guangdong Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, Shantou 515063, China
Varenyam Achal: Environmental Engineering Program, Guangdong Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, Shantou 515063, China

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 7, 1-10

Abstract: Wasps are a group of social insects that build a house, known as a nest, from locally available building materials cemented by their saliva and secretions. Similar to termite nests, there could be many beneficiary bacteria present in their house that can play an important part in maintaining sustainability in soil ecosystems. Thus, the present study was initiated with a physico-chemical characterization of wasp nests collected from residential and forest zones, followed by unconfined compressive strength (UCS) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis to identify major associated minerals. Further, MiSeq Illumina sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene (V3–V4 regions) was carried out to analyze complete bacterial community composition of wasp nests. The resulting data showed a dominance of Actinobacteria followed by Proteobacteria in both nests. Kaistobacter and Phycicoccus were the dominant genera in each type of wasp nest. It was concluded that wasp nests are an abundant source to isolate bacteria that can potentially be helpful in soil biogeochemical cycling and fertility, antibiotics production and bioremediation.

Keywords: bacterial diversity; biominerals; compressive strength; V3–V4 regions; wasp nest (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/7/2652/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/7/2652/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:7:p:2652-:d:337747

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().