Rumen microbial community composition varies with diet and host, but a core microbiome is found across a wide geographical range
By G. Henderson, Faith Cox, S. Ganesh, A. Jonker, W. Young, L. Abecia, E. Angarita, P. Aravena, Graciela Nora Arenas, C. Ariza and 136 more. Scientific Reports, 2015
1,355 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Ruminant livestock are important sources of human food and global greenhouse gas emissions. Feed degradation and methane formation by ruminants rely on metabolic interactions between rumen microbes and affect ruminant productivity. Rumen and camelid foregut microbial community composition was determined in 742 samples from 32 animal species and 35 countries, to estimate if this was influenced by diet, host species, or geography. Similar bacteria and archaea dominated in nearly all samples, while protozoal communities were more variable. The dominant bacteria are poorly characterised, but the methanogenic archaea are better known and highly conserved across the world. This universality and limited diversity could make it possible to mitigate methane emissions by developing strategies that target the few dominant methanogens. Differences in microbial community compositions were predominantly attributable to diet, with the host being less influential. There were few strong co-occurrence patterns between microbes, suggesting that major metabolic interactions are non-selective rather than specific.
Subfields: Agronomy and Crop Science, Environmental Chemistry, Plant Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c8a3d3c7468da0a0ac30793dca86b16df58130cf
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Citations in the corpus
- American Gut: an Open Platform for Citizen Science Microbiome Research (2018, neutral): “For example, core fecal taxa of herbivorous mammals (both hindgut fermenters and ruminants) have been identified to include both Prevotella and Ruminococcaceae (31, 32).”
- Specific microbiome-dependent mechanisms underlie the energy harvest efficiency of ruminants (2016, methodology): “Microbial composition of the rumen has been described using various techniques (Brulc et al., 2009; Hess et al., 2011; Jami and Mizrahi, 2012; Henderson et al., 2015).”
- Scientists’ warning to humanity: microorganisms and climate change (2019, positive): “Manipulating the rumen microbiota 260 and breeding programmes that target host genetic factors that change microbial community responses 261 are possibilities for reducing methane emission from cattle.”
- Strategies to improve the efficiency of beef cattle production (2020, background): “However, given that the composition of the microbiome is overwhelmingly determined by the nature of the diet (Henderson et al. 2015) and the apparent variation in the rumen microbial indicators associated with RFI, their usefulness is yet to be proven.”