Fish Gut Targeted Locus (Loci). gut metagenome

Vertebrate intestines are home to a complex and variable microbial gut community. Members of these communities can be shared among different hosts, promoting the concept of a specific core gut microbiota that may be essential for normal gastrointestinal functionality. Most studies investigating this concept have focused on mammals, yet fish represent the majority of vertebrate diversity. Here we describe gut communities of Atlantic cod caught at a single location based on 16S rRNA amplicon sequences. We find that a limited number of OTUs is shared among all specimens. Moreover, the relative abundance of these shared OTUs varies several orders of magnitude among samples, leading to a tentative presence of these OTUs in some individuals at most. Considering our extensive sequencing effort, we find that a substantial core gut microbiota is not easily detected in Atlantic cod.