Covariation of diet and gut microbiome in African megafauna.

ABSTRACT: A major challenge in biology is to understand how phylogeny, diet, and environment shape the mammalian gut microbiome. Yet most studies of nonhuman microbiomes have relied on relatively coarse dietary categorizations and have focused either on individual wild populations or on captive animals that are sheltered from environmental pressures, which may obscure the effects of dietary and environmental variation on microbiome composition in diverse natural communities. We analyzed plant and bacterial DNA in fecal samples from an assemblage of 33 sympatric large-herbivore species (27 native, 6 domesticated) in a semiarid East African savanna, which enabled high-resolution assessment of seasonal variation in both diet and microbiome composition. Phylogenetic relatedness strongly predicted microb

SUBMITTER: Kartzinel TR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6876249 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature