How Host Phylogeny and Diet Shape the Specificity and Specificity Diversity of Animal Gut Microbiomes.

ABSTRACT: The forces shaping host specificity in the animal gastrointestinal microbiome (AGM) are often studied through separate lenses: community-level patterns (phylosymbiosis) or lineage-level histories (cophylogeny). Furthermore, traditional diversity metrics fail to capture compositional heterogeneity from host-specific distributions. We bridge these gaps using our SSD (Species Specificity and Specificity Diversity) framework, a recent conceptual and computational advance that quantifies host specificity across scales via: (i) Species Specificity (SS), locating species on the specialist-generalist continuum; (ii) Specificity Diversity (SD), quantifying community compositional heterogeneity; and (iii) statistical tests for identifying unique/enriched species. Applying SSD to 4903 AGM samples fro

SUBMITTER: Ma ZS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12856063 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature