Intestinal Microecology Of Himalayan Tar Sheep, Rock Sheep And European Argali Based On 16S RRNA Gene

There are three Caprinae species in the present study including himalayan tahr,mouflon and bharal.Changing and destroying of habitats contribute to the decline in number of the animals,a totle number of 500 himalayan tahrs and 1000 mouflons are existed in the world.Excessive use of resource and poaching are the major reasons for the population decline.An enormous number of microbes reside in gastrointestinal tract and a most complex ecological system was constituted with the microbes;a kind of coevolution mode happens when interactions developing between gut microbiota and hosts.Gut microbiota makes an important role when hosts maintain normal physical activities,such as substance metabolism,energy transmission,signal transduction and immunity system.Reaserches on animals gut microbiota have carried out with many of domestic animals and some wild animals.Next generation sequencing(NGS)technology can overcome defects in the traditional culture method and molecular biology method,and can make accurate identification of microbes.Gut microbiota in three Caprinae species have not been described.In this study,we take 11 himalayan tahrs,9 mouflons and 8 bharals as objects,which were collected from Xining Wildlife Park and Jinan Zoo.We amplified the 16 S rRNA gene and builded library for high-throughput sequencing;more than 1,850,000 non-chimeric tags were obtained.We made OTUs cluster analysis and species annotation with 97% sequences identity.We obtained average 1382 OTUs within 28 samples.Species annotation indicate that himalayan tahrs gut microbiota were divided into 16 phylum and 224 genus;low altitudes mouflons were divided into 21 phylum and 218 genus;high altitudes mouflons were divided into 28 phylum and 298 genus;low altitudes bharals were divided into 17 phylum and 210 genus;high altitudes bharals were divided into 20 phylum and 246 genus.The highest abundance phylums between all of the samples are Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes,and the abundance of Firmicutes accounts more than 50%.The sum of the two phylums accounts for 80%.Clostridiales belongs to Firmicutes and Bacteroidales belongs Bacteroidetes are closely related to coarse fibre digestion.Statistical analysis show that there are a certain differences between three three Caprinae species under similar environment,the ratio in himalayan tahr between Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes is significantly higher than two other species,which suggests that himalayan tahr has higher coarse fibre digestion ability and it can make himalayan tahr to adapt more harsh environment.Differences between mouflon and bharal are not statisticallyevident(P=0.064).The himalayan tahr male samples gut microbiota diversity is a little higher than its female samples,but the difference is not statistically significant.The mouflons and bharals in high altitudes has a high ratio between Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes,and it is significantly higher than low altitudes mouflons and bharals,which suggests that high altitudes species have higher coarse fibre digestion ability and it can make high altitudes species to adapt alpine hypoxia environment.In this paper,community structure of gut microbiota was studied in three Caprinae species,and we analyzed the differences of affects which including altitudes,gender and species,scientific protection strategies were proposed for three Caprinae species.