Similarity of the dog and human gut microbiomes in gene content and response to diet

Luis Pedro Coelho,Yuanlong Pan,Paul Igor Costea,Coralie Fournier,Matthew Robert Hayward,Jens Roat Kultima,Thomas Sebastian Benedikt Schmidt,Gail Czarnecki-Maulden,Patrick Descombes,Peer Bork,Sofia K Forslund,Qinghong Li,Janet R Jackson

doi:10.1186/s40168-018-0450-3

Abstract

BackgroundGut microbes influence their hosts in many ways, in particular by modulating the impact of diet. These effects have been studied most extensively in humans and mice. In this work, we used whole genome metagenomics to investigate the relationship between the gut metagenomes of dogs, humans, mice, and pigs.ResultsWe present a dog gut microbiome gene catalog containing 1,247,405 genes (based on 129 metagenomes and a total of 1.9 terabasepairs of sequencing data). Based on this catalog and taxonomic abundance profiling, we show that the dog microbiome is closer to the human microbiome than the microbiome of either pigs or mice. To investigate this similarity in terms of response to dietary changes, we report on a randomized intervention with two diets (high-protein/low-carbohydrate vs. lower protein/higher carbohydrate). We show that diet has a large and reproducible effect on the dog microbiome, independent of breed or sex. Moreover, the responses were in agreement with those observed in previous human studies.ConclusionsWe conclude that findings in dogs may be predictive of human microbiome results. In particular, a novel finding is that overweight or obese dogs experience larger compositional shifts than lean dogs in response to a high-protein diet.

Highlights

Gut microbes influence their hosts in many ways, in particular by modulating the impact of diet
We investigated the effect of dietary intervention on the dog gut microbiome in a randomized control trial (RCT), containing equal numbers of lean/normal (LN) and overweight/obese dogs (OW)
A dog gut microbiome gene catalog A total of 129 dog stool samples were collected from 64 dogs (32 Labrador retrievers and 32 beagles; see Additional file 1: Table S1 for physical characteristics of the study cohort), with two samples from each dog

Summary

Introduction

Gut microbes influence their hosts in many ways, in particular by modulating the impact of diet. These effects have been studied most extensively in humans and mice. We used whole genome metagenomics to investigate the relationship between the gut metagenomes of dogs, humans, mice, and pigs. The gut microbiome has been shown to impact the health of its host, in particular by mediating the impact of diet on host body weight [1,2,3]. We leverage a nutritional study on dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) to study the relationship between its microbiome and those of humans, pigs, and mice. Humans, dogs, pigs, and mice are at a similar genetic distance from each

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Conclusion