Termite guts, inhabited by diverse bacterial communities, are considered among the most efficient bioreactors with a high capacity for lignocellulose degradation and utilization.
In this study, we reconstructed a bacterial community of wood-eating higher termite Nasutitermes takasagoensis by using PacBio HiFi long-read sequencing together with Illumina short-read sequencing. Taxonomical and functional analysis of the mostly uncultivated lineages and their distribution across gut compartments with distinct microenvironments are presented in this study. While the alkaline P1 compartment contained specific lineages of Clostridiales, the posterior hindgut compartments P3 and P4 were predominantly colonized by putatively fiber-associated lineages of Spirochaetes and Fibrobacteres. We reconstructed phylogenetic tree of the N. takasagoensis gut microbiome using single-copy prokaryotic marker genes set. Our approach resulted in many highly complete bacterial genomes that will enable elucidation of the gene functions critical for wood bio-utilization.