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Composition and Drivers of Gut Microbial Communities in Arctic-Breeding Shorebirds
Citation:
Grond, K., J. SantoDomingo, R. Lanctot, A. Jumpponen, R. Bentzen, M. Boldenow, S. Brown, B. Casler, J. Cunnigham, A. Doll, S. Freeman, B. Hill, S. Kendall, E. Kwon, J. Liebezeit, L. Pirie-Dominix, J. Rausch, AND B. Sandercock. Composition and Drivers of Gut Microbial Communities in Arctic-Breeding Shorebirds. Frontiers in Microbiology. Frontiers, Lausanne, Switzerland, 10:2258, (2019). https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2019.02258
Impact/Purpose:
The work aim at understanding the host and environmental factors that impact the variation in gut microbiota composition in migratory shorebirds. These waterfowl species are important sources of fecal pollution and understanding their fecal microbiota is important to ongoing efforts in microbial source tracking. Thus the work is relevant to public health official and beach managers in the US and to TMDL efforts.
Description:
Gut microbiota interact with host health, but factors that determine gut microbial composition can differ among hosts. In mammals, host phylogeny is considered the main driver of gut microbiota, a result of vertical transfer of microbiota during birth. Past studies of birds have found support for both phylogeny and environmental factors as drivers of gut microbiota composition. We identified host and environmental factors that underlie variation in gut microbiota composition in eight species of migratory shorebird breeding in the North American Arctic and Subarctic. We characterized bacterial communities from 375 fecal samples collected from adults at nine sites in Alaska and Canada, by sequencing the V4 region of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene. Firmicutes (55.4%), Proteobacteria (13.8%), Fusobacteria (10.2%) and Bacteroidetes (8.1%) dominated the gut microbiota of adult shorebirds. Sampling site was the main driver of variation in gut microbiota of Arctic-breeding shorebirds (R2 = 11.6%), followed by host species (R2 = 1.8%), and sampling year (R2 = 0.9%). Site variation resulted from differences in the core bacterial taxa, whereas host species variation was driven by rare, low-abundance bacteria. Our study is the first to highlight the potential importance of local environment as a driver of gut microbiota composition in Arctic-breeding shorebirds.
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DOI: Composition and Drivers of Gut Microbial Communities in Arctic-Breeding Shorebirds
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