Lan Zhao, Christine M Cunningham, Adam M Andruska, Katharina Schimmel, Md Khadem Ali, Dongeon Kim, Shenbiao Gu, Jason L Chang, Edda Spiekerkoetter, Mark R Nicolls
The laboratory rat emerges as a useful tool for studying the interaction between the host and its microbiome. To advance principles relevant to the human microbiome, we systematically investigated and defined the multitissue microbial biogeography of healthy Fischer 344 rats across their lifespan. Microbial community profiling data were extracted and integrated with host transcriptomic data from the Sequencing Quality Control consortium. Unsupervised machine learning, correlation, taxonomic diversity and abundance analyses were performed to determine and characterize the rat microbial biogeography and identify four intertissue microbial heterogeneity patterns (P1-P4)...
January 31, 2024: Lab Animal