Kelvin Wong, Timothy I. Shaw, Adelumola Oladeinde, Travis C. Glenn, Brian Oakley, Marirosa Molina
Abstract
Although development of next generation sequencing (NGS) has substantially improved our understanding of the microbial ecology of animal feces, previous studies have mostly focused on freshly excreted feces. There is still limited understanding of the aging process dynamics of fecal microbiomes in intact cowpats exposed to natural environments. Fresh cowpats were sampled at multiple time points for 57 days under field conditions; half the samples were exposed to sunlight (unshaded) while the other half was protected from sunlight (shaded). The 16SRNA hypervariable region 4 was amplified from each sample and sequenced on an Illumina MiSeq Platform. While Clostridia, Bacteroidia, and Sphingobacteria were dominant classes of bacteria in fresh cowpats, Alphaproteobacteria, Betaproteobacteria, Actinobacteria, and Bacilli were the dominant classes by the end of the study, indicating a general shift from anaerobic to aerobic bacterial populations. This change was most likely influenced by the shift from cattle gut (anaerobic) to pasture ground (aerobic). Reduced moisture in cowpats may also contribute to the community shift since air can penetrate the dryer cowpat more easily. Twelve genera consisting pathogenic bacteria were detected, with Mycobacterium, Bacillus, and Clostridium being the most abundant; their combined abundance accounts for 90% of the total pathogenic genera. Taxonomic richness and diversity increased throughout the study for most samples, which could be due to bacteria regrowth and colonization of bacteria from the environment. In contrast to the high taxonomic diversity, the changes of PICRUSt inferred function profile were minimal for all cowpats throughout the study, which suggest that core functions predicted by PICRUSt may be too conserved to distinguish differences between aerobe and anaerobe. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study demonstrating that cowpat exposure to air and sunlight can cause drastic microbiome changes soon after deposition in natural environments. Our findings offer important insights for future research characterizing the microbiome of feces collected in natural environments and the impact of cattle fecal contamination on water resources.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 14. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 12 May 2016.
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#2,605,088
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#61
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Altmetric has tracked 25,452,734 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 89th percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 29,377 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a little more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 6.4. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 93% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 559 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 89% of its contemporaries.
