The impact of environmental pollution on the gut microbiome of Tanzanian goats

Several factors impact the composition of the gut microbiome e.g. diet, host genetics, environment, lifestyle and geographic location. In this project, we are investigating how environmental pollution impacts the gut microbiome of Tanzanian goats using shotgun metagenomics. We want to investigate if these pollutants can select for certain bacteria with specific xenobiotic and plastic degradation capabilities in goats living near a busy road compared with more rural goats. Prior to quantifying this, we characterized the gut microbiome of these goats and found that only 7% of the reads could be mapped and aligned to our custom genomic database. The reads were assembled, binned and de-replicated, and an updated version of the custom genomic database were created. This increased the percentage of explained reads from 7% to 52%.

Emilie Egholm Bruun Jensen’s presentation