Using gut microbiota to predict origins and qualities of cultured sea cucumbers

According to the help of high-throughput sequencing of 287 intestinal contents, we provided the first biogeographic pattern of gut microbiota of A. japonicus across the main origins of China. The results showed that the diversity and composition of gut microbiota in A. japonicus exhibited a clear geographic pattern. Additionally, the quality variables of A. japonicus were also found to be significantly different among different origins with the highest quality in Dalian East. The gut microbiota of A. japonicus was strongly driven by stochastic processes, with more than 70% and 64.26%-92.79% of community variations among A. japonicus from different origins explained by neutral community and null models, respectively. Importantly, the origins of A. japonicus could be predicted from the random forest model constructed by the identified 20 key gut bacterial genera with 97.6% accuracy. Further, individual quality traits such as fat, saponin, and taurine could be predicted by gut microbiota with the strong correlations between predicted and true values (R2 value > 0.8).