Diets containing edible cricket support a healthy gut microbiome in dogs
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Food Science and Technology, Microbiology, Veterinary Medicine
- Keywords
- gut microbiome, dog, edible cricket, prebiotic, diet
- Copyright
- © 2019 Jarett et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2019. Diets containing edible cricket support a healthy gut microbiome in dogs. PeerJ Preprints 7:e27677v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27677v1
Abstract
The gut microbiome plays an important role in the health of dogs. Both beneficial microbes and overall diversity can be modulated by diet. Fermentable sources of fiber in particular often increase the abundance of beneficial microbes. House crickets (Acheta domesticus) contain the fermentable polysaccharides chitin and chitosan. In addition, crickets are an environmentally sustainable protein source. Considering crickets as a potential source of both novel protein and novel fiber for dogs, 4 diets ranging from 0% to 24% cricket content were fed to determine their effects on healthy dogs’ (n = 32) gut microbiomes. Fecal samples were collected serially at 0, 14, and 29 days, and processed using high-throughput sequencing of 16S rRNA gene PCR amplicons. Microbiomes were generally very similar across all diets at both the phylum and genus level, and alpha and beta diversities did not differ between the various diets at 29 days. A total of 12 ASVs (amplicon sequence variants) from nine genera significantly changed in abundance following the addition of cricket, often in a dose-response fashion with increasing amounts of cricket. A net increase was observed in Catenibacterium, Lachnospiraceae [Ruminococcus], and Faecalitalea, whereas Bacteroides, Faecalibacterium, Lachnospiracaeae NK4A136 group and others decreased in abundance. The changes in Catenibacterium and Bacteroides are predicted to be beneficial to gut health. However, the total magnitude of all changes was small and only a few specific taxa changed in abundance. Overall, we found that diets containing cricket supported the same level of gut microbiome diversity as a standard healthy balanced diet. These results support crickets as a potential healthy, novel food ingredient for dogs.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
Supplemental Information
Raw and rarefied ASV tables
The raw ASV table contains one sample which was dropped from all analyses due to a highly divergent community relative to other samples. The rarefied ASV table is subsampled to a depth of 26,679 reads per sample.
Metadata, read counts, and observed ASVs for all samples
Two-way analysis of variance of read counts
P-values in bold are considered statistically significant.
Linear mixed-effects model results for alpha and beta diversity metrics
Analysis of composition of microbiomes at a p-value of 0.05, for ASVs with at least 500 total reads and minimum prevalence of 10% of samples
Sequencing reads per sample, grouped by date of sampling
Phylum-level composition of gut microbiomes in dogs consuming diets containing different amounts of cricket meal, sampled longitudinally over the course of 29 days
Low-abundance phyla Euryarchaeota, Synergistetes, Spirochaetes, Deferribacteres are not shown.
Genus-level composition of gut microbiomes in dogs consuming diets containing different amounts of cricket meal, sampled longitudinally over the course of 29 days
Only the 15 most abundant genera are shown.