Characterization of fungus microbial diversity in healthy and diarrheal yaks in Gannan region of Tibet Autonomous Prefecture

Abstract

Diarrhea is a serious epidemic in yaks on Qinghai Tibet plateau, but the exact pathogen is not confirmed. Diarrhea is related to the changes in diversity of intestinal flora. The current study herein is performed for high-throughput sequencing of fungus microbial diversity in healthy adult yaks, diarrheal adult yaks and diarrheal yak calves in Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. A total 446726 optimized sequences were achieved. Over 250 OTUs in species level have been indentified for each sample. The Shannon and Simpson index revealed that there was no visible difference in the flora between different yak groups (p > 0.05). However, obvious difference was watched in the principal component of microbial community structure in different yak groups by PCA analysis, especially between healthy adult yak group and diarrheal adult yak groups. There were 248 fungus species shared in three groups. Interestingly, there were 97 fungus species shared in the diarrheal groups (calves and adult yaks), which were not found in the healthy yaks, while there were 212 fungus species only found in the healthy yaks. In the Phylum level, 1 phylum (Neocallimastigomycota) was discovered to have significant difference between healthy yaks and diarrheal yak calves (p < 0.05). In the genus level, 23 genus were found obvious difference between healthy adult yaks and diarrheal adults yaks (p < 0.05); 28 genus were found significant difference between healthy adult yaks and diarrheal yak calves (p < 0.05); 23 genus were found obvious difference between diarrheal adult yaks and diarrheal yak calves (p < 0.05). The present study herein first reported an insight of the change of microbial diversity of fungus in diarrhea yaks at altitude regions, which contributed towards the solid prevention of diarrhea in yaks.

Keywords: Diarrhea; Fungus; ITS; Microbial diversity; Yak.