The transition to a solid diet, as well as environmental and social stress, have a direct impact on swine gut physiology during weaning, affecting host gastrointestinal functions, as well as resident symbiotic microbial communities. While plant-derived bioactive products, such as phytobiotics, have shown great potential to mitigate these challenges, providing benefits such as antimicrobial, antioxidant, and anti-inflammatory activities, their mechanisms of action remain largely unexplored. To gain more insight, a 21 day trial is conducted to investigate the effects of LiveXtract, a commercial plant-based product, using fecal samples as a proxy for gut bacteria in weaned pigs. High-throughput sequencing of amplicons targeting the V1–V3 region of the 16S rRNA gene is used to determine bacterial composition at days 1 (pre-treatment), 4, 10, and 21 postweaning. Our results show that Lactobacillaceae and Peptostreptococcaceae are both higher in the supplemented group at D4 (p < 0.05), while Streptococcaceae are significantly lower in the treated group at D10 and D21. At D10, Erysipelotrichaceae are lower, and Veillonellaceae are higher in the treated samples than the control group (p < 0.05). Of the thirteen abundant Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) that have different representation between treated and control pigs (p < 0.05), six are predicted to be lactate producers (affiliation to Lactobacillus or Streptococcus), and one is predicted to be a lactate utilizer, based on its high identity to Megasphaera elsdenii. Together, these data suggest that phytobiotics may provide a favorable metabolic equilibrium between lactate production and utilization. Lactate is considered a critical microbial end product in gut environments, as it can inhibit pathogens or be metabolized to propionate for utilization by host cells.
To overcome the challenges of pasture-finishing of bison, producers commonly feed them with higher energy, grain-based diets to reach the desired market weight. However, decades of research on domesticated ruminants have shown that such diets can have profound effects on the composition of gut microbial communities. To gain further insight, the 16S rRNA gene-based study described in this report aimed to compare the composition of ruminal and fecal bacterial communities from two herds of bison heifers (n = 20/herd) raised on different ranches that were both transitioned from native pasture to a grain-based, free-choice diet for ~100 days prior to slaughter. Comparative analyses of operational taxonomic unit (OTU) composition, either by alpha diversity indices, principal coordinate analysis (PCoA), or on the most abundant individual OTUs, showed the dramatic effect of a diet on the composition of both rumen and fecal bacterial communities in bison. Indeed, feeding a grain-based diet resulted in a lower number of rumen and fecal bacterial OTUs, respectively, compared to grazing on pasture (p < 0.05). PCoA revealed that the composition of the rumen and fecal bacterial communities from the two herds was more similar when they were grazing on native pastures compared to when they were fed a grain-based, free-choice diet. Finally, a comparative analysis of the 20 most abundant OTUs from the rumen and fecal communities further showed that the representation of all these species-level bacterial groups differed (p < 0.05) between the two dietary treatments. Together, these results provide further insights into the rumen and fecal microbiomes of grazing bison and their response to grain-based diet regimens commonly used in intensive ruminant production systems.
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