Phylogenetic diversity analysis of shotgun metagenomic reads describes gut microbiome development and treatment effects in the post-weaned pig

PLoS One. 2022 Jun 24;17(6):e0270372. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0270372. eCollection 2022.

Abstract

Intensive farming practices can increase exposure of animals to infectious agents against which antibiotics are used. Orally administered antibiotics are well known to cause dysbiosis. To counteract dysbiotic effects, numerous studies in the past two decades sought to understand whether probiotics are a valid tool to help re-establish a healthy gut microbial community after antibiotic treatment. Although dysbiotic effects of antibiotics are well investigated, little is known about the effects of intramuscular antibiotic treatment on the gut microbiome and a few studies attempted to study treatment effects using phylogenetic diversity analysis techniques. In this study we sought to determine the effects of two probiotic- and one intramuscularly administered antibiotic treatment on the developing gut microbiome of post-weaning piglets between their 3rd and 9th week of life. Shotgun metagenomic sequences from over 800 faecal time-series samples derived from 126 post-weaning piglets and 42 sows were analysed in a phylogenetic framework. Differences between individual hosts such as breed, litter, and age, were found to be important contributors to variation in the community composition. Host age was the dominant factor in shaping the gut microbiota of piglets after weaning. The post-weaning pig gut microbiome appeared to follow a highly structured developmental program with characteristic post-weaning changes that can distinguish hosts that were born as little as two days apart in the second month of life. Treatment effects of the antibiotic and probiotic treatments were found but were subtle and included a higher representation of Mollicutes associated with intramuscular antibiotic treatment, and an increase of Lactobacillus associated with probiotic treatment. The discovery of correlations between experimental factors and microbial community composition is more commonly addressed with OTU-based methods and rarely analysed via phylogenetic diversity measures. The latter method, although less intuitive than the former, suffers less from library size normalization biases, and it proved to be instrumental in this study for the discovery of correlations between microbiome composition and host-, and treatment factors.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Anti-Bacterial Agents / pharmacology
  • Dysbiosis
  • Female
  • Gastrointestinal Microbiome* / genetics
  • Microbiota*
  • Phylogeny
  • Probiotics*
  • Swine
  • Weaning

Substances

  • Anti-Bacterial Agents

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council, linkage grant LP150100912. This project was funded by the Australian Centre for Genomic Epidemiological Microbiology (Ausgem), a collaborative partnership between the NSW Department of Primary Industries and the University of Technology Sydney. TZ and DG are recipients of UTS International Research and UTS President’s Scholarships. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, or preparation of the manuscript. NSW DPI approved the paper before submission for publication.