Wei Fuwen academician's team revealed: food-driven large, red panda gut microbes converge and evolution.

Recently, Wei Fuwen, academician of Institute of zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, published a research paper entitled "diet drives convergent evolution of gut microbiology in bamboo eating specialties" in Science China Life Sciences.intestinal microorganisms are closely related to the host in the long-term evolution process, and play an important role in the adaptive evolution of the host.intestinal microflora can affect the host's nutritional metabolism, physiological health and other life processes, at the same time, it is also affected by the host's feeding habits and system development.however, the relative roles of feeding habits and phylogenetic factors in shaping intestinal microbial structure remain unclear.the highly specialized herbivores of giant panda and red panda and the classification status of carnivores provide a good model for solving this problem.in this study, the team of academician Wei Fuwen studied the intestinal microflora of giant panda and its related species polar bear, black bear, little panda and its related species ferret through 16S rRNA sequencing and metagenomic sequencing, and selected the bovine intestinal microbiome as the outgroup.the results showed that the intestinal microflora of giant panda and red panda fed on bamboo were very similar, while that of carnivorous species polar bear and ferret was more similar.further functional enrichment analysis showed that genes of intestinal microflora of giant panda and red panda were significantly enriched in starch and sucrose metabolic pathway, namely, cellulose digestive enzyme pathway.the results showed that the feeding habits of the giant panda and the red panda led to the convergent evolution of the intestinal microflora of the giant panda and the red panda, suggesting that the feeding habits of the host play an important role in shaping the structure and function of the intestinal microflora.feeding habits drive the convergent evolution of intestinal microbial structure (left picture) and function (right picture) of giant panda and red panda. This study improves our understanding of intestinal microbial evolution and its driving factors, and provides evidence for explaining the coevolutionary relationship between host and gut microbiota.the first and co first authors of this paper are Huang Guangping and Wang Xiao.the research was supported by the strategic leading science and technology project of Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.Article Information: [click the link below or "read the original text" to get the full text] Huang, g., Wang, X., Hu, Y., Wu, Q., Nie, Y., Dong, J., Ding, Y., Yan, L., and Wei, F. (2020). Diet drives convergence evolution of gut microbiology inbamboo-eating species. Sci China Life Sci 63,