Dietary calcium levels and their influence on gut microbial profile of Yunnan Semi-Fine Wool Sheep

Calcium plays important physiological and biological roles in sheep's sustainable health and production. It is well known that dietary calcium deficiency leads to hypocalcemia and rickets in particularly indoor-reared animals. Moreover, imbalanced dietary calcium levels might lead to digestive issues and thus in this way changes in microbial profiling. Therefore, the current study aimed to investigate the influence of dietary calcium levels on the gut microbiota profile of Yunnan Semi-Fine Wool sheep. In the current experiment, thirty male YSFW rams were randomly divided into three groups and each group was allotted to one of three dietary calcium levels by following the completely randomized design. On the 21st day of the experiment, 27 rams were fecal sampled and subjected to 16sRNA sequencing to estimate the changes in gut microbiota composition. The principal coordinate analysis showed that the dietary calcium levels influenced the fecal microbiota composition. The Bray-Curtis distance analysis of the top 30 phyla found that Firmicutes was the most populated bacterial phyla which was followed by Bacteroidetes Proteobacteria Fibrobacteres and Spirochaetes respectively. In this experiment, 490 genera were detected, and 147 genera had significant differences across the groups in relative abundance of the fecal microbiota. Notably, 40, 66 and 41 genera had significant differences between groups .These findings provide insights into how dietary calcium contributes to microbiome profiling to improve the performance of sheep.