Interplay between the hind-gut microbiome, behavior and physiology in sheep managed under different husbandry protocols

In this study, we evaluated the hindgut microbiome composition in sheep under different environmental enrichment protocols for a duration of 8 weeks. The core sheep fecal microbiome across all animals and the differences between treatments were characterized using 16S rRNA gene sequencing.The sheep core-microbiome appears to be dominated by microbial species belonging to few main taxonomic phyla: Firmicutes that accounts for 44% of the fecal microbiota, followed by Bacteroidetes (29.6%), Proteobacteria (10.7%) and Verrucomicrobia (6.7%). Results of the comparative analysis revealed that the microbial community of the animals under enrichment conditions showed higher richness and lower within group variability. Both ACE and chao1 alpha diversity indexes were significantly different. Furthermore, Bay Curtis distances were able to discriminate significantly the enriched animals from the control group. We further identified several operational taxonomic units (OTUs) that showed significant different relative abundance between groups. These results suggest that physical exercise in combination with cognitive training might influence sheep fecal microbiota by increasing microbial richness and lowers within group variability. These results will improve our knowledge on the relationship between microbiota composition and neural plasticity first of all and give light on the sheep microbiome composition and its variability due to husbandry conditions.