Abstract
Simple SummaryGiven the fact that sheep serve as an increased meat product consumption in China, as well as a suitable model for fat deposition, their digestive tract microbiota has drawn growing attention. Our study depicted the gut microbiota community composition and diversity of sheep with varied genotypes but shared geography, with different sampling intestinal sites and probiotics supplementation time. The results indicated the great difference of the gut microbiota in samples from different sheep breeds, various intestinal sites, and different probiotics feeding times. Additionally, all results implied the dominance of the host factor in shaping unique microbiota under a certain environment, the greatest similarity of colonic and fecal microbiota, and the oral probiotic effectiveness for a given period of time for sheep.Three sampling strategies with a 16s rRNA high-throughput sequencing and gene expression assay (by RT-PCR) were designed, to better understand the host and probiotics effect on gut microbiota in sheep. Sampling: (1) colon contents and back-fat tissues from small-tailed Han sheep (SHS), big-tailed Hulun Buir sheep (BHBS), and short-tailed Steppe sheep (SHBS) (n = 12, 14, 12); (2) jejunum, cecum and colon contents, and feces from Tan sheep (TS, n = 6); (3) feces from TS at 4 time points (nonfeeding, 30 and 60 feeding days, and stop feeding 30 days) with probiotics supplementation (n = 7). The results indicated SHS had the highest Firmicutes abundance, the thinnest back-fat, and the lowest expression of C/EBPβ, C/EBPδ, ATGL, CFD, and SREBP1. Some bacteria orders and families could be potential biomarkers for sheep breeds with a distinct distribution of bacterial abundance, implying the host genotype is predominant in shaping unique microbiota under a shared environment. The microbiota diversity and Bifidobacterial populations significantly changed after 60 days of feeding but restored to its initial state, with mostly colonies, after 30 days ceased. The microbiota composition was greatly different between the small and large intestines, but somewhat different between the large intestine and feces; feces may be reliable for studying large intestinal microbiota in ruminants.
Highlights
There have already been many researches and achievements demonstrating the importance of gastrointestinal tract bacteria, which plays an important role in the growth, metabolism, and immunity of hosts [1,2]
Beta diversity of intestinal bacterial microbiota was performed by the principal coordinates analysis (PCoA), based on Bray-Curtis distance (Figure 1b)
Analysis of similarities (ANOSIM) was employed to judge the difference of the microbiota community structure among breeds and indicated when pairwise comparison was carried out; there were significant differences between the big-tailed Hulun Buir sheep (BHBS) and small-tailed Han sheep (SHS) groups and SHBS and SHS groups, and a larger variation existed within the BHBS group (Figure S2)
Summary
There have already been many researches and achievements demonstrating the importance of gastrointestinal tract bacteria, which plays an important role in the growth, metabolism, and immunity of hosts [1,2]. We employed four types of sheep breeds, which are the small-tailed Han sheep (SHS), the big-tailed Hulun Buir sheep (BHBS), the short-tailed Steppe sheep ( named the small-tailed Hulun Buir sheep, SHBS), and the Tan sheep (TS) to explore how the host genetic background and dietary supplement impact the intestinal microbiota composition and stability in sheep (Table S1). These four types of sheep breeds originated from different types of wild ancestors [10,11,12], but all belonged to the Mongolian sheep group, according to their development and breed formation.
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