Diet, habitat environment and lifestyle conversion affect the gut microbiomes of giant pandas

Abstract

Gut microbiota (GM) are important for the health of giant pandas (GPs), in addition to the utilization of bamboo in their diets. However, it is not fully understood how diet, habitat environment and lifestyle contribute to the composition of GM in GP. Consequently, we evaluated how dietary changes, habitat environment conversions and lifestyle shifts influence the GM of GPs using high-throughput sequencing and genome-resolved metagenomics. The GM of GPs were more similar when their hosts exhibited the same diet. High fiber diets significantly increased the diversity and decreased the richness of gut bacterial communities alone or interacted with the age factor (p < 0.05). The abundances of Streptococcus, Pseudomonas, Enterococcus, Lactococcus, Acinetobacter, and Clostridium significantly increased during diet conversion process (Non-parametric factorial Kruskal-Wallis sum-rank test, LDA > 4). Reconstruction of 60 metagenome-assembled-genomes (MAGs) indicated that these bacteria were likely responsible for bamboo digestion via gene complements involved in cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin degradation. While habitat environment may play a more important role in shaping the GM of GP, lifestyle can also greatly affect bacterial communities. The GM structure in reintroduced GPs notably converged to that of wild pandas. Importantly, the main bacterial genera of wild GPs could aid in lignin degradation, while those of reintroduced GPs were related to cellulose and hemicellulose digestion. Streptococcus, Pseudomonas, Enterococcus, Lactococcus, Acinetobacter, and Clostridium may contribute to lignocellulose digestion in GP. The results revealed that diet conversion, habitat environment and lifestyle could remarkably influence the GM of GP. In addition, results suggested that increasing the ability of lignin degradation with GM may aid to change the GM of reintroduced pandas to resemble those of wild pandas.

Keywords: Diet conversion; Giant panda; Gut microbiota; Habitat environment; Lifestyle.