Gut Microbiota Composition of Insectivorous Synanthropic and Fructivorous Zoo Bats: A Direct Metagenomic Comparison.

Bats are natural reservoirs for many emerging viral diseases. That is why their virome is widely studied. But at the same time, studies of their bacterial gut microbiota are limited, creating a degree of uncertainty about the role of bats in global microbial ecology. In this study, we analyzed gut microbiota of insectivorous and from rehabilitation centers from Rostov-on-Don and Moscow, respectively, and fructivorous from the Moscow Zoo based on V3-V4 16S rRNA metagenomic sequencing. We revealed that microbial diversity significantly differs between the insectivorous and fructivorous species studied, while the differences between and are less pronounced, which shows that bats' gut microbiota is not strictly species-specific and depends more on diet type. In the gut microbiota of synanthropic bats, we observed bacteria that are important for public health and animal welfare such as , , , , , , and , as well as some lactic acid bacteria such as , , , and . All these bacteria, except for and were significantly less abundant in . This study provides a direct metagenomic comparison of synanthropic insectivorous and zoo fructivorous bats, suggesting future directions for studying these animals' role in microbial ecology.