Analysis of the gut microbiome of Rag2-/-vc-/- and wild-type mothers and their respective MMc+ and MMclow offspring

Since the composition of the maternal microbiome can influence offspring's microbiome and innate immune development, we analyzed the gut microbiome of Rag2-/-vc-/- and wild-type mothers and their respective MMc+ and MMclow offspring. Using full-length 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing, differences of intestinal microbiota composition were observed between Rag2-/-vc-/- and wild-type mothers, as expected from published data. However, no significant differences of the microbiome were present between neonatal MMc+ and MMclow offspring. Since the significant differences of gut microbiota between adult and neonatal mice of the respective groups may camouflage differences within the F1 subgroups in this analysis, we also assessed the PCA restricted to the F1 samples and could confirm that the gut microbiota did not significantly differ between the two offspring groups.