Microbial Community Structure and Metabolism of Xinjiang Fine-Wool Sheep based on high-throughput sequencing technology

Abstract

Background: It turns out that the more than trillion microorganisms living in the host’s digestive tract are crucial for maintaining nutrient intake, environmental suitability, and physiological mechanism. Xinjiang Fine-Wool Sheep is a kind of wool breed bred independently in China, which excellent stress tolerance. Understanding the microbial community of Xinjiang Fine-Wool Sheep helps to raise sheep healthy and the production of superior traits. Result: In this study, we collected feces and blood samples of 20 Xinjiang fine-wool sheep in different wool-length. By 16S rDNA amplicon sequence, ITS1 region amplicons and Targeted Metabolomics, we analysed the microbial community structure of fecal microorganisms and Short Chain Fatty Acids (SCFAs) in serum of the Xinjiang fine-wool sheep as different by the host wool-length. Fecal microbial sequencing showed that the bacterial composition and structure of the two groups were similar, while the fungal community composition and structure were significantly different. Among them, the bacterial gut community was similar to those characterised in previous studies and are the dominated phyla by Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes. However, compared to the Control Fine-Wool Sheep (CFWS) group, the fungal gut communities of Fine-Wool Sheep (FWS) have more abundant Neocallimastigomycota. According to report that polysaccharide degrading enzyme produced by a majority of the bacteria in Neocallimastigomycota can hydrolyze non-lignified plant cell walls. In addition, the results of serum SCFAs content showed that butyric acid were significantly differences than another group. Correlation analysis between SCFAs and bacteria found that butyric acid metabolism had positively correlated (p<0.05) with Ruminococcus and UCG-005. Conclusion: Overall, our data provide more supplement about the gut microbes community composition and structure of the Xinjiang Fine-Wool Sheep. These results might be useful for improving stress tolerance and gut health in sheep, and taking nutritional control measure to improve production traits of animals in future.