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Background  Termites are an important food resource for many human populations around the world, and are a good supply of nutrients. The fungus-farming ‘higher’ termite members of Macrotermitinae are also consumed by modern great apes and are implicated as critical dietary resources for early hominins. While the chemical nutritional composition of edible termites is well known, their microbiomes are unexplored in the context of human health. Here we sequenced the V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene of gut microbiota extracted from the whole intestinal tract of two  Macrotermes sp.  soldiers collected from the Limpopo region of South Africa.    Results  Major and minor soldier subcastes of  M. falciger  exhibit consistent differences in taxonomic representation, and are variable in microbial presence and abundance patterns when compared to another edible but less preferred species,  M. natalensis . Subcaste differences include alternate patterns in sulfate-reducing bacteria and methanogenic Euryarchaeota abundance, and differences in abundance between  Alistipes  and  Ruminococcaceae .  M. falciger  minor soldiers and  M. natalensis  soldiers have similar microbial profiles, likely from close proximity to the termite worker castes, particularly during foraging and fungus garden cultivation. Compared with previously published termite and cockroach gut microbiome data, the taxonomic representation was generally split between termites that directly digest lignocellulose and humic substrates and those that consume a more distilled form of nutrition as with the omnivorous cockroaches and fungus-farming termites. Lastly, to determine if edible termites may point to a shared reservoir for rare bacterial taxa found in the gut microbiome of humans, we focused on the genus  Treponema . The majority of  Treponema  sequences from edible termite gut microbiota most closely relate to species recovered from other termites or from environmental samples, except for one novel OTU strain, which clustered separately with  Treponema  found in hunter-gatherer human groups.    Conclusions   Macrotermes  consumed by humans display special gut microbial arrangements that are atypical for a lignocellulose digesting invertebrate, but are instead suited to the simplified nutrition in the fungus-farmer diet. Our work brings to light the particular termite microbiome features that should be explored further as avenues in human health, agricultural sustainability, and evolutionary research.    Electronic supplementary material  The online version of this article (10.1186/s12866-019-1540-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

bmc microbiology

Taxonomic features and comparisons of the gut microbiome from two edible fungus-farming termites (Macrotermes falciger; M. natalensis) harvested in the Vhembe district of Limpopo, South Africa