Metagenomic analysis of the cow, sheep, reindeer and red deer rumen

Abstract

The rumen microbiota comprises a community of microorganisms which specialise in the degradation of complex carbohydrates from plant-based feed. These microbes play a highly important role in ruminant nutrition and could also act as sources of industrially useful enzymes. In this study, we performed a metagenomic analysis of samples taken from the ruminal contents of cow (Bos Taurus), sheep (Ovis aries), reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) and red deer (Cervus elaphus). We constructed 391 metagenome-assembled genomes originating from 16 microbial phyla. We compared our genomes to other publically available microbial genomes and found that they contained 279 novel species. We also found significant differences between the microbiota of different ruminant species in terms of the abundance of microbial taxonomies, carbohydrate-active enzyme genes and KEGG orthologs. We present a dataset of rumen-derived genomes which in combination with other publicly-available rumen genomes can be used as a reference dataset in future metagenomic studies.