Abstract
Domesticated animals experienced profound changes in diet, environment, and social interactions that likely shaped their gut microbiota and were potentially analogous to ecological changes experienced by humans during industrialization. Comparing the gut microbiota of wild and domesticated mammals plus chimpanzees and humans, we found a strong signal of domestication in overall gut microbial community composition and similar changes in composition with domestication and industrialization. Reciprocal diet switches within mouse and canid dyads demonstrated the critical role of diet in shaping the domesticated gut microbiota. Notably, we succeeded in recovering wild-like microbiota in domesticated mice through experimental colonization. Although fundamentally different processes, we conclude that domestication and industrialization have impacted the gut microbiota in related ways, likely through shared ecological change. Our findings highlight the utility, and limitations, of domesticated animal models for human research and the importance of studying wild animals and non-industrialized humans for interrogating signals of host-microbial coevolution.
Highlights
Industrialized, agrarian, and foraging human populations differ along numerous ecological dimensions, including diet, physical activity, the size and nature of social networks, pathogen exposure, types and intensities of medical intervention, and reproductive patterns
Industrialization and domestication are fundamentally different processes, the ecological parallels between human industrialization and animal domestication suggest that the gut microbiota of diverse domesticated animals may differ in consistent ways from those of their wild progenitors, and further, that their
While we focus primarily on the impacts of domestication on the mammalian gut microbiota, we include analyses of industrialized and non-industrialized human populations because much is known about the effects of industrialization on the gut microbiota and as such it can serve as a benchmark ecological process for domestication
Summary
Industrialized, agrarian, and foraging human populations differ along numerous ecological dimensions, including diet, physical activity, the size and nature of social networks, pathogen exposure, types and intensities of medical intervention, and reproductive patterns. The convergent nature of many ecological shifts experienced by domesticated animals and industrialized human populations suggests that domesticated animals may provide a uniquely useful model for studying the microbially mediated health impacts of rapid environmental change that results in mismatch between host, microbiota, and/or environment, a situation thought to apply to humans in industrialized settings (Sonnenburg and Sonnenburg, 2019). Understanding what shapes the domesticated microbiota may identify routes to improve experimental models, animal condition, and human health
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