Quadram Institute Bioscience, Norwich, United Kingdom.
School of Veterinary Medicine, University of Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom.
PeerJ. 2022 Mar 23;10:e13084. doi: 10.7717/peerj.13084. eCollection 2022.
The horse plays crucial roles across the globe, including in horseracing, as a working and companion animal and as a food animal. The horse hindgut microbiome makes a key contribution in turning a high fibre diet into body mass and horsepower. However, despite its importance, the horse hindgut microbiome remains largely undefined. Here, we applied culture-independent shotgun metagenomics to thoroughbred equine faecal samples to deliver novel insights into this complex microbial community.
We performed metagenomic sequencing on five equine faecal samples to construct 123 high- or medium-quality metagenome-assembled genomes from Bacteria and Archaea. In addition, we recovered nearly 200 bacteriophage genomes. We document surprising taxonomic diversity, encompassing dozens of novel or unnamed bacterial genera and species, to which we have assigned new names. Many of these genera are conserved across a range of mammalian gut microbiomes.
Our metagenomic analyses provide new insights into the bacterial, archaeal and bacteriophage components of the horse gut microbiome. The resulting datasets provide a key resource for future high-resolution taxonomic and functional studies on the equine gut microbiome.
马在全球范围内发挥着重要作用，包括赛马、工作和伴侣动物以及食用动物。马的后肠微生物群在将高纤维饮食转化为体重和马力方面起着关键作用。然而，尽管其重要性，马的后肠微生物群仍然在很大程度上没有得到定义。在这里，我们应用无培养的鸟枪法宏基因组学对纯种马粪便样本进行了分析，以深入了解这一复杂的微生物群落。
我们对五个马的粪便样本进行了宏基因组测序，从细菌和古菌中构建了 123 个高质量或中等质量的宏基因组组装基因组。此外，我们还回收了近 200 个噬菌体基因组。我们记录了惊人的分类多样性，包括几十个新的或未命名的细菌属和种，我们为这些属和种赋予了新的名称。这些属中的许多在各种哺乳动物的肠道微生物群中都有保守。
我们的宏基因组分析为马肠道微生物群的细菌、古菌和噬菌体成分提供了新的见解。由此产生的数据集为未来对马肠道微生物群进行高分辨率分类和功能研究提供了关键资源。
