Abstract
Abstract The objective of this study was to compare the establishment of human fecal bacterial communities in porcine and murine animal models. Many gut microbiota studies use human microbiota-associated (HMA) rodents as translational animal models; however, it has been questioned as to how successfully a human microbiota can be established in rodents considering the many differences that exist between rodents and humans. The domestic pig (Sus scrofa domesticus) has many anatomical, physiological, and immunological similarities to humans and has been widely used as a model for humans in biomedical and nutritional studies. Thus, the porcine model may be an alternative to rodent models in gut microbiota research. The current study was designed to evaluate the establishment of the same human donor microbiota in the rodent and pig models. Both germ-free piglets and mice (C3H/HeN) were transplanted with fecal microbiota from four human donors: Infant (0–5 m), child (1–12 yrs), adult (18–64 yrs), and elderly (65+ yrs). To monitor the establishment of the transplanted microbiota, weekly fecal samples were collected for 5 wks. All fecal samples were subjected to 16S rRNA gene-based amplicon sequencing using the Illumina MiSeqTM platform to characterize bacterial community composition. Unweighted unifrac distances were compared between the bacterial communities of the human donor and the corresponding HMA porcine and murine fecal samples. Statistical significance was tested using the Mann-Whitney U test (P = 0.05). This analysis suggested that more taxa are colonized in the mice compared to the piglets receiving the same infant donor microbiota, while for the child, adult, and elderly donors, the piglet model established the human donor microbiota better than the mice receiving the same donor samples. This suggests that in the latter stages of human development, more species of the human fecal inoculum colonizes the pig gut compared to the mouse gut.
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