Microbial Community Structure and Metabolism of Xinjiang Fine-Wool Sheep based on High-Throughput Sequencing...

It turns out that the more than trillion microorganisms living in the host's digestive tract are crucial for maintaining nutrient intake, environmental suitability, and physiological mechanism. Xinjiang fine-wool sheep is an exclusive breed for wool in China, which has excellent stress tolerance. In this study, we collected feces and blood samples of 20 Xinjiang fine-wool sheep under the same genetic characteristics, the Fine-Wool Sheep (FWS) group and the Control Fine-Wool Sheep (CFWS) group were set up according to the differs in phenotypic characteristics of their wool. By 16S rRNA amplicon sequence, ITS1 region amplicons and Targeted Metabolomics, we analyzed the microbial community structure of fecal microorganisms and Short Chain Fatty Acids (SCFAs) in serum of the Xinjiang fine-wool sheep. Fecal microbial sequencing showed that the bacterial composition and structure were similar between the two groups, whereas there were significant differences in the composition and structure of the fungal community. It was also found that the abundant of Neocallimastigomycota in the intestinal fungal community of FWS was higher. In addition, the results of the serum SCFAs content analysis showed that butyric acid was significantly differences than those two groups. Correlation analysis between SCFAs and bacteria found that butyric acid metabolism had positively correlated (P < 0.05) with Ruminococcus and UCG-005. Overall, our data provide more supplement about the gut microbes community composition and structure of the Xinjiang fine-wool sheep. These results might be useful for improving gut health of sheep and taking nutritional control measure to improve production traits of animals in future.