Gut Microbiome of Nectarivorous birds in relation to nectar microbiome and secondary metabolites: ecological and evolutionary perspectives

In nature the Sunbirds feeds on the nectar of tobacco plants which contains toxic metabolites Nicotine/Anabasine. These secondary metabolites may be toxic to sunbirds and also this tobacco nectar contains very less nitrogen sources. So the birds which feed on this nectar should cope up with the toxicity and also should use these metabolites as nitrogen sources for their metabolism. so we hypothesis that the gut microbiome may be responsible for the degradation of Nicotine/Anabasine to help the birds to resist toxicity and also get nitrogen sources. In our experiment the Nicotine-Anabsine was feed to Sunbirds and their effect on the bird's microbiome was analyzed. The cloacal samples was collected from the Nicotine-Anabsine feed birds and the DNA was extracted and sequenced to check the changes in diversity of Microbial population in gut of Sunbirds.