Gut microbiota facilitates adaptation of the plateau zokor (Myospalax baileyi) to the plateau living environment

Bin Hu; Jiamin Wang; Ying Li; Jin Ge; Jinchao Pan; Gaojian Li; Yongcai He; Haishun Zhong; Bo Wang; Yanyi Huang; Shuyi Han; Yanan Xing; Hongxuan He

doi:10.3389/fmicb.2023.1136845

Gut microbiota facilitates adaptation of the plateau zokor (Myospalax baileyi) to the plateau living environment

Front Microbiol. 2023 Feb 24:14:1136845. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2023.1136845. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Bin Hu^{1

2}, Jiamin Wang^{1

2}, Ying Li³, Jin Ge¹, Jinchao Pan⁴, Gaojian Li^{1

2}, Yongcai He³, Haishun Zhong⁵, Bo Wang^{1

2}, Yanyi Huang^{1

2}, Shuyi Han^{1

2}, Yanan Xing^{1

2}, Hongxuan He¹

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
² College of Life Science, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
³ College of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry, Qinghai University, Xining, China.
⁴ College of Animal Sciences, Anhui University of Science and Technology, Huainan, China.
⁵ Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Station of Xunhua, Xining, Qinghai, China.

Abstract

Gut microbiota not only helps the hosts to perform many key physiological functions such as food digestion, energy harvesting and immune regulation, but also influences host ecology and facilitates adaptation of the host to extreme environments. Plateau zokors epitomize successful physiological adaptation to their living environment in the face of the harsh environment characterized by low temperature, low pressure and hypoxia in the Tibetan plateau region and high concentrations of CO₂ in their burrows. Therefore, here we used a metagenomic sequencing approach to explore how gut microbiota contributed to the adaptive evolution of the plateau zokor on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Our metagenomic results show that the gut microbiota of plateau zokors on the Tibetan plateau is not only enriched in a large number of species related to energy metabolism and production of short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), but also significantly enriched the KO terms that involve carbohydrate uptake pathways, which well address energy uptake in plateau zokors while also reducing inflammatory responses due to low pressure, hypoxia and high CO₂ concentrations. There was also a significant enrichment of tripeptidyl-peptidase II (TPPII) associated with antigen processing, apoptosis, DNA damage repair and cell division, which may facilitate the immune response and tissue damage repair in plateau zokors under extreme conditions. These results suggest that these gut microbiota and their metabolites together contribute to the physiological adaptation of plateau zokors, providing new insights into the contribution of the microbiome to the evolution of mammalian adaptation.

Keywords: SCFAs; TPPII; gut microbiota; metagenome; plateau adaptation; plateau zokor (Myospalax baileyi).