Abstract
BackgroundAnalgesia is often indicated in rabbits undergoing surgical procedures or suffering from various painful conditions and the most common adverse effects associated with NSAIDs occur in the gastrointestinal tract (GIT). The objective of this study was to determine the potential effect of long-term (21 days) meloxicam administration on the fecal bacterial microbiota in healthy rabbits.Samples of hard feces were collected from six rabbits treated with meloxicam (1 mg/kg orally once every 24 h) on days 0,6,14 and 21. Next generation sequencing of V4 16S rRNA gene products was performed.ResultsA total of 2589912 V4 rRNA gene sequences passed all quality control filters. Firmicutes predominated (82.0 ± 6.2%). Sixteen other phyla were also identified but other than Verrucomicrobia (4.4 ± 4.9%), all accounted for less than 1% of the identified sequences. Within Firmicutes, Clostridia was the dominant class, accounting for 76% of operational taxon units (OTUs). In general, there were only few differences observed between time points and different rabbits at the phylum level. A significant change was observed in the relative abundance of Proteobacteria over the 4 time points (P = 0.02).ConclusionsThe gastrointestinal tract of rabbits harbors dense and diverse microbiota. Significant alteration of the hard fecal microbiota does not appear to be a considerable adverse effect expected in rabbits treated for 21 days with oral meloxicam at a dose of 1 mg/kg.
Highlights
Analgesia is often indicated in rabbits undergoing surgical procedures or suffering from various painful conditions and the most common adverse effects associated with nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) occur in the gastrointestinal tract (GIT)
This study explores the stability over time of bacterial communities in hard feces in healthy rabbits medicated with oral meloxicam, using high throughput sequencing of the V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene
Meloxicam was administered daily to each rabbit, and all of the rabbits seemed to remain healthy during the study
Summary
Analgesia is often indicated in rabbits undergoing surgical procedures or suffering from various painful conditions and the most common adverse effects associated with NSAIDs occur in the gastrointestinal tract (GIT). The fecal or intestinal microbiota of domestic rabbits has been extensively studied through culture dependent methods, as well as earlier generation culture-independent methods, with a focus on the cecal microbiota [9,10,11,12,13]. Limitations of these methods for understanding the overall microbial composition are well known. While earlier studies have provided some important information, the ability of generation sequencing based studies such as this to evaluate millions of bacterial sequences from diverse (and often unculturable) microbial populations is possible
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