Microbial associations and spatial proximity predict North American moose (Alces alces) gastrointestinal community composition ...

Microbial communities are increasingly recognised as crucial for animal health. However, our understanding of how microbial communities are structured across wildlife populations is poor. Mechanisms such as interspecific associations are important in structuring free-living communities, but we still...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Fountain-Jones, Nicholas, Clark, Nicholas, Kinsley, Amy, Carstensen, Michelle, Forester, James, Timothy, Johnson, Miller, Elizabeth, Moore, Seth, Wolf, Tiffany, Craft, Meggan
Format: Dataset
Language:English
Published: Dryad 2019
Subjects:
Online Access:https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.j9kd51c7k
https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.j9kd51c7k
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Summary:Microbial communities are increasingly recognised as crucial for animal health. However, our understanding of how microbial communities are structured across wildlife populations is poor. Mechanisms such as interspecific associations are important in structuring free-living communities, but we still lack an understanding of how important interspecific associations are in structuring gut microbial communities in comparison to other factors such as host characteristics or spatial proximity of hosts. Here we ask how gut microbial communities are structured in a population of North American moose (Alces alces). We identify key microbial interspecific associations within the moose gut and quantify how important they are relative to key host characteristics, such as body condition, for predicting microbial community composition. We sampled gut microbial communities from 55 moose in a population experiencing decline due to a myriad of factors, including pathogens and malnutrition. We examined microbial community ... : The data was collected from fecal samples taken from live captured moose (55 individuals). Amplicons were sequenced sequenced on the Illumina MiSeq platform. Raw sequencing reads were processed using the University of Minnesota’s metagenomics-pipeline (a complete description of the pipeline can be found at https://bitbucket.org/jgarbe/gopher-pipelines/wiki/metagenomics-pipeline.rst) Representative OTU sequences were aligned against the Greengenes version 13_8 core set (DeSantis et al., 2006b) using UCLUST (Edgar, 2010) with QIIME default parameters. See Appendix 1 & 2 for details on the analyical pipeline used. ...