Li Yaonan, Lan Yanfang
School of Physical Education and National Equestrian Academy, Wuhan Business University, Wuhan, China.
Research Center for Modern Equine Industry Development, Wuhan, China.
Front Microbiol. 2025 Apr 15;16:1582821. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2025.1582821. eCollection 2025.
The gut microbial importance and its crucial roles in host digestion, immunity, and metabolism have received widely attention. Horses, especially indigenous varieties such as Mongolian horses (MGH) and Guizhou horses (GZH), have not received sufficient attention, and the characteristics of their gut microbiota are still unclear. For this purpose, we collected faecal samples from eight MGH and eight GZH to compare their gut microbial differences using amplicon sequencing. The results of alpha diversity analysis indicated that the gut bacterial diversity and gut fungal abundance in GZH were significantly higher than those in MGH. Meanwhile, beta diversity revealed that there were significant differences in the gut bacterial and fungal structures between GZH and MGH. Although the dominant bacterial and fungal phyla of GZH and MGH were the same, there were a large number of significantly different bacteria and fungi between both groups. Moreover, we observed that there were 32 phyla (23 bacterial phyla and 9 fungal phyla) and 718 genera (383 bacterial genera and 335 fungal genera) with significant differences between the GZH and MGH. Notably, this study also revealed some differences in intestinal functions between MGH and GZH, such as chemoheterotrophy, fermentation, and cellulolysis. To our knowledge, this is the first report on the comparative analysis of the gut microbiota between MGH and GZH. Our results demonstrated that GZH have a richer and more diverse gut microbiota compared with MGH. Additionally, these results are important for understanding the gut microbial characteristics of indigenous horse.
肠道微生物的重要性及其在宿主消化、免疫和代谢中的关键作用已受到广泛关注。马，尤其是蒙古马（MGH）和贵州马（GZH）等本土品种，尚未得到充分关注，其肠道微生物群的特征仍不清楚。为此，我们收集了8匹蒙古马和8匹贵州马的粪便样本，采用扩增子测序比较它们的肠道微生物差异。α多样性分析结果表明，贵州马的肠道细菌多样性和肠道真菌丰度显著高于蒙古马。同时，β多样性显示，贵州马和蒙古马的肠道细菌和真菌结构存在显著差异。虽然贵州马和蒙古马的优势细菌和真菌门类相同，但两组之间存在大量显著不同的细菌和真菌。此外，我们观察到贵州马和蒙古马之间有32个门类（23个细菌门类和9个真菌门类）和718个属（383个细菌属和335个真菌属）存在显著差异。值得注意的是，本研究还揭示了蒙古马和贵州马在肠道功能方面的一些差异，如化学异养、发酵和纤维素分解。据我们所知，这是关于蒙古马和贵州马肠道微生物群比较分析的首次报道。我们的结果表明，与蒙古马相比，贵州马的肠道微生物群更丰富、更多样化。此外，这些结果对于了解本土马的肠道微生物特征具有重要意义。
