Microbial Diversity Profiling of Gut Microbiota of Macropus giganteus Using Three Hypervariable Regions of the Bacterial 16S rRNA

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O'Dea, Christian
Huerlimann, Roger
Masters, Nicole
Kuballa, Anna
Veal, Cameron
Fisher, Paul
Stratton, Helen
Katouli, Mohammad
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2021
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Abstract

Animal faecal contamination of surface waters poses a human health risk, as they may contain pathogenic bacteria or viruses. Of the numerous animal species residing along surface wa-terways in Australia, macropod species are a top contributor to wild animals’ faecal pollution load. We characterised the gut microbiota of 30 native Australian Eastern Grey Kangaroos from six geo-graphical regions (five kangaroos from each region) within South East Queensland in order to es-tablish their bacterial diversity and identify potential novel species-specific bacteria for the rapid detection of faecal contamination of surface waters by these animals. Using three hypervariable regions (HVRs) of the 16S rRNA gene (i.e., V1–V3, V3–V4, and V5–V6), for their effectiveness in delineating the gut microbial diversity, faecal samples from each region were pooled and microbial genomic DNA was extracted, sequenced, and analysed. Results indicated that V1-V3 yielded a higher taxa richness due to its larger target region (~480 bp); however, higher levels of unassigned taxa were observed using the V1-V3 region. In contrast, the V3–V4 HVR (~569 bp) attained a higher likelihood of a taxonomic hit identity to the bacterial species level, with a 5-fold decrease in unassigned taxa. There were distinct dissimilarities in beta diversity between the regions, with the V1- V3 region displaying the highest number of unique taxa (n = 42), followed by V3–V4 (n = 11) and V5–V6 (n = 8). Variations in the gut microbial diversity profiles of kangaroos from different regions were also observed, which indicates that environmental factors may impact the microbial development and, thus, the composition of the gut microbiome of these animals.

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Microorganisms

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9

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8

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© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Bacteriology

Zoology

Science & Technology

Life Sciences & Biomedicine

Microbiology

gut microbiota

diversity profiling

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O'Dea, C; Huerlimann, R; Masters, N; Kuballa, A; Veal, C; Fisher, P; Stratton, H; Katouli, M, Microbial Diversity Profiling of Gut Microbiota of Macropus giganteus Using Three Hypervariable Regions of the Bacterial 16S rRNA, Microorganisms, 2021, 9 (8)

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