Gut Fungal Communities of Anser erythropus Wintering at Shengjin Lake and Caizi Lake in China.

Diet is among the most relevant factors affecting gut microbial communities and affects the host gut microbiota composition and function. We investigated the gut fungal communities of Anser erythropus wintering at either Shengjin Lake or Caizi Lake, China, using high-throughput sequencing of the internal transcribed spacer gene region. We retained 1,302,562 valid tags corresponding to 2,102 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) from 20 fecal samples (ten per lake). The OTUs from the Shengjin Lake geese represented 7 phyla, 27 classes, 81 orders, 151 families, and 395 genera; those from the Caizi Lake geese comprised 7 phyla, 28 classes, 73 orders, 133 families, and 232 genera. Ascomycota, Basidiomycota, Zygomycota and Rozellomycota were the dominant gut fungal phyla in the geese. The alpha-diversity indices differed significantly between the Shengjin Lake and Caizi Lake geese. The Shengjin Lake geese ate mainly Poaceae species, whereas the Caizi Lake geese ate mainly Carex spp., suggesting that different diets might induce varied gut fungal communities between the geese. More fungal genera were significantly correlated with bacterial genera (Sphingobacterium, Brevundimonas, Stenotrophomonas, Chryseobacterium, Acinetobacter, and Pseudomonas) in pairwise populations, and Ceratobasidium, Tomentella, Paurocotylis, Tuber, Podospora and Mortierella were the core fungal genera among the geese from both lakes. Nine potentially pathogenic species were identified across all samples, and the relative abundances of potential pathogens were significantly higher in the Shengjin Lake samples than in the Caizi Lake samples. These findings suggest that the gut fungi were highly sensitive to the diets of the geese at both lakes. Potential pathogenic species of A. erythropus should be further studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]