Abstract The animal gut has a remarkable abundance of microbes. These microbes have strong potential for biosynthesis of promising drug candidates, and these small bioactive molecules often medicate important host–microbe and microbe–microbe interactions. To understand the evolution of the animal gut microbes and their biosynthetic gene clusters, we characterized 24 faecal samples from different herbivores, carnivores and omnivores, by next-generation sequencing of the 16S rDNA V3-V4 hypervariable regions and NRPS. The results showed that the host diet and phylogeny both not only influence the bacterial communities, but also that NRPS gene clusters co-diversified with their gut microbiota. We also found that the animal gut microbiome contains abundant secondary metabolic synthesis gene clusters, which prove to be a potential gold mine of novel bioactive natural products. In conclusion, our results reveal the co-diversity of animal gut microbiota and their NRPS gene clusters, and suggest that potential NRPS natural products are hidden in the animal microbiome.

中文翻译：

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一些食肉动物、食草动物和杂食动物的动物肠道微生物和 NRPS 基因簇的多样化

摘要 动物肠道内含有丰富的微生物。这些微生物在生物合成有前景的候选药物方面具有强大的潜力，并且这些小的生物活性分子通常可以促进重要的宿主-微生物和微生物-微生物相互作用。为了了解动物肠道微生物及其生物合成基因簇的进化，我们通过 16S rDNA V3-V4 高变区和 NRPS 的下一代测序，对来自不同食草动物、食肉动物和杂食动物的 24 份粪便样本进行了表征。结果表明，宿主饮食和系统发育不仅影响细菌群落，而且 NRPS 基因簇与其肠道微生物群共同多样化。我们还发现动物肠道微生物组含有丰富的次级代谢合成基因簇，这被证明是新型生物活性天然产物的潜在金矿。总之，我们的结果揭示了动物肠道微生物群及其 NRPS 基因簇的共同多样性，并表明潜在的 NRPS 天然产物隐藏在动物微生物群中。