ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2022
Gut microbiota individuality is contingent on temporal scale and age in wild meerkats.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Climate Change, Epigenetics, Microbiota, and Health.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2026Review
- Impact of animal socioecology on gut microbial communities: Insights from wild meerkats in the Kalahari.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- Microbial solutions to dietary stress: experimental evolution reveals host-microbiome interplay inProceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Metagenomic analyses of gut microbiome composition and function with age in a wild bird; little change, except increased transposase gene abundance.ISME communications · 2025Article
- Article
- Gut microbiome communities demonstrate fine-scale spatial variation in a closed, island bird population.ISME communications · 2025Article
- Long-distance movement dynamics shape host microbiome richness and turnover.FEMS microbiology ecology · 2024Article
- Effects of past and present habitat on the gut microbiota of a wild rodent.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Seasonal restructuring facilitates compositional convergence of gut microbiota in free-ranging rodents.FEMS microbiology ecology · 2023Article
- Evolutionary implications of host genetic control for engineering beneficial microbiomes.Current opinion in systems biology · 2023Review
- Article
- Mock community as an in situ positive control for amplicon sequencing of microbiotas from the same ecosystem.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Taxonomic, Genomic, and Functional Variation in the Gut Microbiomes of Wild Spotted Hyenas Across 2 Decades of Study.mSystems · 2023Article
- Individualized composition or community dynamics? A new statistical approach to assess the individuality of host-associated microbiomes.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Gut microbiota individuality is contingent on temporal scale and age in wild meerkats.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
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Abstract
Inter-individual differences in gut microbiota composition are hypothesized to generate variation in host fitness-a premise for the evolution of host-gut microbe symbioses. However, recent evidence suggests that gut microbial communities are highly dynamic, challenging the notion that individuals harbour unique gut microbial phenotypes. Leveraging a long-term dataset of wild meerkats, we reconcile these concepts by demonstrating that the relative importance of identity for shaping gut microbiota phenotypes depends on the temporal scale. Across meerkat lifespan, year-to-year variation overshadowed the effects of identity and social group in predicting gut microbiota composition, with identity explaining on average less than 2% of variation. However, identity was the strongest predictor of microbial phenotypes over short sampling intervals (less than two months), predicting on average 20% of variation. The effect of identity was also dependent on meerkat age, with the gut microbiota becoming more individualized and stable as meerkats aged. Nevertheless, while the predictive power of identity was negligible after two months, gut microbiota composition remained weakly individualized compared to that of other meerkats for up to 1 year. These findings illuminate the degree to which individualized gut microbial signatures can be expected, with important implications for the time frames over which gut microbial phenotypes may mediate host physiology, behaviour and fitness in natural populations.
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