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Community structures of fecal bacteria in cattle from different animal feeding operations
Citation:
SHANKS, O. C., C. A. KELTY, S. Archibeque, M. Jenkins, R. J. Newton, S. L. McLellan, S. M. Huse, AND M. L. Sogin. Community structures of fecal bacteria in cattle from different animal feeding operations . APPLIED AND ENVIRONMENTAL MICROBIOLOGY. American Society for Microbiology, Washington, DC, 77(9):2992-3001, (2011).
Impact/Purpose:
To inform the public.
Description:
The fecal microbiome of cattle plays a critical role not only in animal health and productivity, but also in methane emissions, food safety, pathogen shedding, and the performance of fecal pollution detection methods. Unfortunately, most published molecular surveys fail to provide adequate detail about variability in fecal bacteria community structure within and across cattle populations. Using massively-parallel pyrosequencing of a hypervariable region of the rRNA coding region, we profiled the fecal microbial communities of cattle from six different feeding operations where cattle received consistent management practices for a minimum of 90 days. We obtained a total of 633,877 high-quality sequences from 30 adult beef cattle fecal samples (5 individuals per operation). Sequence-based clustering and taxonomic analyses indicate less variability within a population than between populations. Overall bacteria community composition correlated significantly with fecal starch concentrations, largely reflected in changes to the Bacteroidetes, Proteobacteria, and Firmicutes populations. In addition, network analysis demonstrated that annotated sequences clustered by management practice and fecal starch concentration suggesting that the structure of bovine fecal bacteria communities can be dramatically different between different animal feeding operations, even at the phylum and family taxonomic levels, and that feeding operation is a more important determinant of cattle microbiome than is geographic location of the feedlot.
