What is it about?
We investigated whether feeding highly purified diets to adult dogs for 36 weeks would alter bacterial populations and their genetic potential in the gut sufficiently to result in persistent change following the dogs' return to a commercial diet. As expected, the microbiome changed when the purified diet was fed, but the original microbiome was reconstituted within weeks of the dogs returning to the commercial diet.
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Why is it important?
The significance of these findings is in identifying an intrinsic stability of the gut microbiome in healthy dogs, suggesting that dietary changes to support adult dog health through modifying the gut microbiome may only be achieved through maintenance on a specified diet, rather than through feeding transitionary diets.
Perspectives
This was a great example of collaboration across different research teams at WALTHAM, maximising value from a long-term nutrition trial to derive novel insights into microbiome research using bioinformatic skills from the Data Science team. For me, the results were much for fascinating that the hypothesis we postulated - especially those from the metagenomics analysis.
Dr David Allaway
Mars Inc
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Rapid Reconstitution of the Fecal Microbiome after Extended Diet-Induced Changes Indicates a Stable Gut Microbiome in Healthy Adult Dogs, Applied and Environmental Microbiology, April 2020, ASM Journals,
DOI: 10.1128/aem.00562-20.
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