Can I read You Are More Than What You Eat: Potentially Adaptive Enrichment of Microbiome Functions Across Bat Dietary Niches on EtoBox?

You Are More Than What You Eat: Potentially Adaptive Enrichment of Microbiome Functions Across Bat Dietary Niches by Melissa R. Ingala; Nancy B. Simmons; Miranda Dunbar; Claudia Wultsch; Konstantinos Krampis; Susan L. Perkins is a Agricultural and Biological Sciences article available to read on EtoBox.

What is You Are More Than What You Eat: Potentially Adaptive Enrichment of Microbiome Functions Across Bat Dietary Niches about?

## Background: Animals evolved in a microbial world, and their gut microbial symbionts have played a role in their ecological diversification. while many recent studies report patterns of phylosymbiosis between hosts and their gut bacteria, fewer studies examine the potentially adaptive functional contributions of these microbes to the dietary habits of their hosts. in this study, we examined predicted metabolic pathways in the gut bacteria of more than 500 individual bats belonging to 60 species and compare the enrichment of these functions across hosts with distinct dietary ecologies. ## Results: We found that predicted microbiome functions were differentially enriched across hosts with different diets. using a machine-learning approach, we also found that inferred microbiome functions could be used to predict specialized host diets with reasonable accuracy. we detected a relationship between both host phylogeny and diet with respect to microbiome functional repertoires. because many predicted functions could potentially fill nutritional gaps for bats with specialized diets, we considered pathways discriminating dietary niches as traits of the host and fit them to comparative phy

Who reads You Are More Than What You Eat: Potentially Adaptive Enrichment of Microbiome Functions Across Bat Dietary Niches?

Author

Melissa R. Ingala; Nancy B. Simmons; Miranda Dunbar; Claudia Wultsch; Konstantinos Krampis; Susan L. Perkins

Published

2021

Language

EN

Field

Agricultural and Biological Sciences (Life Sciences)