Altered Gut Archaeal Communities in Anser erythropus Populations Wintering at Shengjin and Caizi Lakes in China
Altered Gut Archaeal Communities in Anser erythropus Populations Wintering at Shengjin and Caizi Lakes in China
Shaofei Zhang1, Na Xu2 and Gang Liu2*
ABSTRACT
Archaea are an important component of the gut microbiomes of animals and play a key role in animal health. However, they have been neglected in previous microbial studies, particularly those involving migratory waterbirds. Here, we investigated the gut archaeal communities of Anser erythropus wintering at Shengjin and Caizi Lakes in China using metagenomic analysis of 20 fecal samples (ten samples per lake). The operational taxonomic units (OTUs) in the gut archaea of geese wintering in the two lakes represented 16 phyla, 16 classes, 24 orders, 27 families, and 45 genera, with Euryarchaeota, Thaumarchaeota, and Bathyarchaeota being the dominant gut archaeal phyla. The results of alpha diversity analysis showed a significant difference in composition between the Shengjin and Caizi Lake samples, and orthogonal partial least squares-discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) analysis indicated that geese were well-matched with their lakes of origin. Stamp analysis revealed a difference of 27 gut archaeal species between A. erythropus wintering at Shengjin Lake and those at Caizi Lake. Archaeal network analysis results fell into four major modules, with Methanolobus psychrotolerans and Thaumarchaeota archaeon as the hub modules. The abundances of several bacterial and fungal genera were significantly correlated with abundances of archaeal genera in pairwise populations, and a positive correlation was observed between archaeal, bacterial, and fungal diversities in the guts of A. erythropus wintering at both Shengjin and Caizi Lakes (R=0.4, p=2.2×10-16; R=0.86, p=2.2×10-16, respectively). This suggests that fecal bacteria and fungi may cooperate with archaea to perform crucial roles in the gut. However, because of the small sample size in this study, further studies are needed to fully investigate the altered archaea in the guts of these geese.
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