Gastrointestinal microbiota of wild and inbred individuals in two House Mouse subspecies assessed using high throughput parallel pyrosequencing

Jakub Kreisinger ^1,2, Dagmar Čížková ², Jaroslav Piálek ²

¹ Department of Zoology, Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic
² Academy of Science of the Czech Republic, Institute of Vertebrate Biology, Brno, Czech Republic

The effect of gastrointestinal tract microbiota (GTM) on the physiological and health status of the host has obtained considerable interest in past years. Various captive bread animal species are used in the experimental branch of this research. It is, however, poorly known to that extent does the GTM of captive and/or inbred individuals resemble the natural composition and variation of GTM in wild populations. We performed 16S rDNA barcoding of gut microbiota in 30 house mouse (Mus musculus) individuals from wild population and from wild-derived inbred strains using 454 pyrosequencing. Sequenced individuals were selected according to balanced 2x2 experimental design: their origin into wild (14) vs. inbred (16) and M. m. musculus (15) vs. M. m. domesticus (15). We compared alpha diversity (i.e. number of operational taxonomic units), beta diversity (i.e. interindividual variability) and microbiota composition across the four groups. We found no difference between musculus and domesticus subspecies, indicating that gut microbiota does not play role in the speciation process. Both inbred and wild population showed the same level of microbial diversity. We found strong differentiation of wild and inbred population based on the microbiota composition. Laboratory mouse represents the most abundant model to study the effect of gut microbiota on host metabolism, immunity and neurology. We suggested, that the existence of distinct microbiota in laboratory-kept mice, which differs in composition from the natural wild microbiota should be further considered in the biomedical research.