Department of Ruminant Science, Institute of Animal Sciences, Agricultural Research Organization, Bet Dagan, Israel.
PLoS One. 2012;7(3):e33306. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0033306. Epub 2012 Mar 14.
The bovine rumen houses a complex microbiota which is responsible for cattle's remarkable ability to convert indigestible plant mass into food products. Despite this ecosystem's enormous significance for humans, the composition and similarity of bacterial communities across different animals and the possible presence of some bacterial taxa in all animals' rumens have yet to be determined. We characterized the rumen bacterial populations of 16 individual lactating cows using tag amplicon pyrosequencing. Our data showed 51% similarity in bacterial taxa across samples when abundance and occurrence were analyzed using the Bray-Curtis metric. By adding taxon phylogeny to the analysis using a weighted UniFrac metric, the similarity increased to 82%. We also counted 32 genera that are shared by all samples, exhibiting high variability in abundance across samples. Taken together, our results suggest a core microbiome in the bovine rumen. Furthermore, although the bacterial taxa may vary considerably between cow rumens, they appear to be phylogenetically related. This suggests that the functional requirement imposed by the rumen ecological niche selects taxa that potentially share similar genetic features.
牛的瘤胃中栖息着复杂的微生物群落，这使得牛能够将难以消化的植物物质转化为食物。尽管这个生态系统对人类具有巨大的意义，但不同动物的瘤胃细菌群落的组成和相似性，以及一些细菌类群可能存在于所有动物的瘤胃中，这些仍有待确定。我们使用标签扩增子焦磷酸测序技术对 16 头泌乳奶牛的瘤胃细菌种群进行了表征。当使用 Bray-Curtis 度量法分析丰度和出现时，我们的数据显示细菌分类群在样本之间具有 51%的相似性。通过在使用加权 UniFrac 度量法的分析中添加分类群系统发育，相似性增加到 82%。我们还计算了所有样本共有的 32 个属，这些属在样本之间的丰度变化很大。总之，我们的结果表明在牛的瘤胃中存在一个核心微生物组。此外，尽管牛的瘤胃中的细菌分类群可能有很大的差异，但它们似乎在系统发育上是相关的。这表明瘤胃生态位所施加的功能要求选择了可能具有相似遗传特征的类群。
