Jessica Lenka ^1,2 Poppy Pescod ³ Shweta Kuba ⁴ Natalie Ferry ^1*

• ¹ School of Science, Engineering and Environment, University of Salford, Manchester, North West England, United Kingdom
• ² Faculty of Natural Sciences, Keele University, Staffordshire, United Kingdom
• ³ Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, Liverpool, United Kingdom
• ⁴ School of Health and Life Sciences, Teesside University, Middleborough, United Kingdom

The microbiota within the guts of insects plays beneficial roles for their hosts, such as facilitating digestion and extracting energy from their diet. The African palm weevil (APW) lives within, and feeds on the high lignin-containing trunk of palm trees; therefore, their guts could harbour a large community of lignin-degrading microbes. In this study, we aimed to explore the bacterial community within the gut of the APW larvae, specifically with respect to the potential for lignin-degradation in various gut segments as a first step to determining the viability of mining bacterial lignin degrading enzymes for the bioconversion of lignocellulosic biomass to biofuels and biomaterials. Bacterial metagenomic DNA was extracted from the foregut, midgut, and hindgut of larvae of the APW, and the V3-V4 hypervariable region of the 16S rRNA gene was sequenced using the Illumina Miseq platform. The generated data was analyzed and taxonomically classified to identify the different bacterial phylotypes within the gut community cumulatively, and per gut segment. We then determined the presence, diversity, and abundance of bacteria associated with lignin degradation within each larval gut compartment as a basis for suggesting the gut segment(s) where lignin degradation occurs the most. All sequences were classified and belonged to the bacterial kingdom. Firmicutes (54.3%) and Proteobacteria (42.5%) were the most dominant phyla within the gut, followed distantly by Bacteroidota (1.7%) and Actinobacteriota (1.4%).