Abstract
Calf diarrhea is one of the most concerning challenges facing both the dairy and beef cattle industry. Maintaining healthy gut microbiota is essential for preventing gastrointestinal disorders. Here, we observed significantly less bacterial richness in the abnormal feces with watery or hemorrhagic morphology compared to the normal solid feces. The normal solid feces showed high relative abundances of Osllospiraceae, Christensenellaceae, Barnesiella, and Lactobacillus, while the abnormal feces contained more bacterial taxa of Negativicutes, Tyzzerella, Parasutterella, Veillonella, Fusobacterium, and Campylobacter. Healthy calves had extensive bacterial-bacterial correlations, with negative correlation between Lactobacillus and potential diarrheagenic Escherichia coli-Shigella, but not in the abnormal feces. We isolated Lactobacillus species (L. reuteri, L. johnsonii, L. amylovorus, and L. animalis), with L. reuteri being the most abundant, from the healthy gut microbiota. Isolated Lactobacillus strains inhibited pathogenic strains including E. coli K88 and Salmonella Typhimurium. These findings indicate the importance of a diverse gut microbiota in newborn calf’s health and provide multiple potential probiotics that suppress pathogen colonization in the gastrointestinal tract to prevent calf diarrhea.
Highlights
Newborn calves are susceptible to diarrhea, especially during the first month of their life (Bendali et al, 1999)
The homeostasis of gut microbial ecosystems is of central importance for maintaining the functions of the gastrointestinal tract of early preweaning calves (Virginio Junior and Bittar, 2021)
We investigated the fecal microbiota composition of one-month-old beef calves raised on pasture based on their fecal morphology
Summary
Newborn calves are susceptible to diarrhea, especially during the first month of their life (Bendali et al, 1999). A healthy gut microbiota prevent colonization of foreign pathogens (Pickard et al, 2017; Fan et al, 2019, 2020, 2021; Kim et al, 2021) and enhance host immune systems through interactions between antigens and immune cells during early stage of life (Zhao and Elson, 2018; Fan et al, 2020). To develop more efficient probiotics for diarrhea mitigation strategies, it is necessary to characterize the gut microbiota in healthy and diarrheic calves. A few studies have investigated the difference in gut microbial composition between healthy and diarrheic dairy calves and indicated the critical role of microbiota development in regulating gut health during early stage (Gomez et al, 2017; Hennessy et al, 2021). The important gut commensals that contribute to preventing diarrhea in newborn beef cattle, especially raised on pasture remain poorly defined
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