Humanization of wildlife gut microbiota in urban environments
- Cornell University, United States
- Princeton University, United States
- Tulane University, United States
Abstract
Urbanization is rapidly altering Earth’s environments, demanding investigation of the impacts on resident wildlife. Here, we show that urban populations of coyotes (Canis latrans), crested anole lizards (Anolis cristatellus), and white-crowned sparrows (Zonotrichia leucophrys) acquire gut microbiota constituents found in humans, including gut bacterial lineages associated with urbanization in humans. Comparisons of urban and rural wildlife and human populations revealed significant convergence of gut microbiota among urban populations relative to rural populations. All bacterial lineages overrepresented in urban wildlife relative to rural wildlife and differentially abundant between urban and rural humans were also overrepresented in urban humans relative to rural humans. Remarkably, the bacterial lineage most overrepresented in urban anoles was a Bacteroides sequence variant that was also the most significantly overrepresented in urban human populations. These results indicate parallel effects of urbanization on human and wildlife gut microbiota and suggest spillover of bacteria from humans into wildlife in cities.
Data availability
Sequencing data have been deposited in Data Dryad at https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.dfn2z353d
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Humanization of wildlife gut microbiota in urban environmentsDryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.dfn2z353d.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institute of General Medical Sciences (R35 GM138284)
- Andrew H Moeller
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Peter J Turnbaugh, University of California, San Francisco, United States
Version history
- Received: December 14, 2021
- Preprint posted: January 6, 2022 (view preprint)
- Accepted: May 16, 2022
- Accepted Manuscript published: May 31, 2022 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: June 16, 2022 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2022, Dillard et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Humanization of wildlife gut microbiota in urban environments
eLife 11:e76381.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.76381
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