Sequencing of gut microbiome diversity in rats at 6, 12, and 18 months of age

DNA was extracted from feces using a DNA extraction kit and the full-length 16sRNA gene was amplified using primers. The purified PCR products were used to construct a sequencing library on the PacBio platform (Biomarker-Technologies Company, China) according to the instructions. Raw subreads were corrected using SMRT-Link (version 8.0) to obtain Circular Consensus Sequencing (CCS) sequences. The lima software (v1.7.0) was then used to identify CCS sequences from different samples based on barcode sequences and chimeras were removed (UCHIME, version 8.1) to obtain high-quality CCS sequences. The resulting dataset was analyzed using USEARCH (version 10.0).