Impact of Limosilactobacillus fermentum probiotic treatment on gut microbiota composition in sahiwal calves with rotavirus diarrhea: A 16S metagenomic analysis study”

Background Diarrhea poses a major threat to bovine calves leading to mortality and economic losses.

Among the causes of calf diarrhea, bovine rotavirus is a major etiological agent and may result in dysbiosis of gut microbiota.

The current study was designed to investigate the effect of probiotic Limosilactobacillus fermentum (Accession No.OR504458) on the microbial composition of rotavirus-infected calves using 16S metagenomic analysis technique.

Screening of rotavirus infection in calves below one month of age was done through clinical signs and Reverse Transcriptase PCR.

The healthy calves ( n  = 10) were taken as control while the infected calves ( n  = 10) before treatment was designated as diarrheal group were treated with Probiotic for 5 days.

All the calves were screened for the presence of rotavirus infection on each day and fecal scoring was done to assess the fecal consistency.

Infected calves after treatment were designated as recovered group.

Fecal samples from healthy, recovered and diarrheal (infected calves before sampling) were processed for DNA extraction while four samples from each group were processed for 16S metagenomic analysis using Illumina sequencing technique and analyzed via QIIME 2.

Results The results show that Firmicutes were more abundant in the healthy and recovered group than in the diarrheal group.

At the same time Proteobacteria was higher in abundance in the diarrheal group.

Order Oscillospirales dominated healthy and recovered calves and Enterobacterials dominated the diarrheal group.

Alpha diversity indices show that diversity indices based on richness were higher in the healthy group and lower in the diarrheal group while a mixed pattern of clustering between diarrheal and recovered groups samples in PCA plots based on beta diversity indices was observed.

Conclusion It is concluded that probiotic Limosilactobacillus Fermentum N-30 ameliorate the dysbiosis caused by rotavirus diarrhea and may be used to prevent diarrhea in pre-weaned calves after further exploration.