The digestive tract histology and geographical distribution of gastrointestinal microbiota in yellow-feather broilers

Exhaustive understanding of intestinal physiological characteristics is the critical precondition for the improvement of intestinal health and growth performance of yellow-feather broilers (YFB). As a vital part of gastrointestinal tract, the symbiotic, complex, and variable microbiota have a profound effect on the nutrition, immunity, health, and production of broilers. Hence, the development status of proventriculus, jejunum, and cecum, and spatial heterogeneity of bacterial community in crop, proventriculus, gizzard, jejunum, cecum, and rectum of adult YFB were detected in our study. The results revealed that proventriculus, jejunum, and cecum of broilers are well-developed based on morphological observation. The Chao and Shannon indexes in cecum and rectum are notably higher than other sections and their microbiota structure is also distinct from foregut. Firmicutes and Lactobacillus are the predominant phylum and genus in all gastrointestinal sections, respectively. As feature species of crop, Lactobacillus spp. mainly settle in foregut, whereas some Clostridia species (unclassified Lachnospiraceae, Faecalibacterium, Romboutsia and so on) are characteristic and more abundant in cecum and rectum. Interestingly, there are 2 Ruminococcus torques strains positively and negatively correlated with cecum development, respectively. In a whole, our findings reveal the specialized digestive physiology and regional distribution of intestinal microbiota in YFB, which provides a reference for the future study on the improvement of growth performance and intestinal development through microbiota manipulation in yellow-feather broilers.