Association between gut health and gut microbiota in a polluted environment
Jernfors, T., Lavrinienko, A., Vareniuk, I., Landberg, R., Fristedt, R., Tkachenko, O., Taskinen, S., Tukalenko, E., Mappes, T., & Watts, P. C. (2024). Association between gut health and gut microbiota in a polluted environment. Science of the Total Environment, 914, Article 169804. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.169804
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Science of the Total EnvironmentAuthors
Date
2024Discipline
ResurssiviisausyhteisöTilastotiedeEkologia ja evoluutiobiologiaSchool of Resource WisdomStatisticsEcology and Evolutionary BiologyCopyright
© 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.
Animals host complex bacterial communities in their gastrointestinal tracts, with which they share a mutualistic interaction. The numerous effects these interactions grant to the host include regulation of the immune system, defense against pathogen invasion, digestion of otherwise undigestible foodstuffs, and impacts on host behaviour. Exposure to stressors, such as environmental pollution, parasites, and/or predators, can alter the composition of the gut microbiome, potentially affecting host-microbiome interactions that can be manifest in the host as, for example, metabolic dysfunction or inflammation. However, whether a change in gut microbiota in wild animals associates with a change in host condition is seldom examined. Thus, we quantified whether wild bank voles inhabiting a polluted environment, areas where there are environmental radionuclides, exhibited a change in gut microbiota (using 16S amplicon sequencing) and concomitant change in host health using a combined approach of transcriptomics, histological staining analyses of colon tissue, and quantification of short-chain fatty acids in faeces and blood. Concomitant with a change in gut microbiota in animals inhabiting contaminated areas, we found evidence of poor gut health in the host, such as hypotrophy of goblet cells and likely weakened mucus layer and related changes in Clca1 and Agr2 gene expression, but no visible inflammation in colon tissue. Through this case study we show that inhabiting a polluted environment can have wide reaching effects on the gut health of affected animals, and that gut health and other host health parameters should be examined together with gut microbiota in ecotoxicological studies.
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ElsevierISSN Search the Publication Forum
0048-9697Keywords
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https://converis.jyu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/202086749
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Research Council of FinlandFunding program(s)
Academy Project, AoFAdditional information about funding
This work was supported by funding from the Research Council of Finland (287153 and 324602 to PCW), the Finnish Cultural Foundation (to TJ) and Koneen Säätiö (to ST).License
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