Microbiome and Its Relationship to Pet Health:Written by: Dr. Ryan Honaker, Director of Microbiology at NomNomNow

This is a sponsored post written by Dr.Ryan Honaker, Director of Microbiology at NomNomNow

In our world, there are life forms so small that we can’t see them with our naked eyes. We need a microscope to see them. These miniscule beings are called microorganisms and include things like bacteria, viruses and fungi. They live everywhere -- from lakes to soil to animals -- in massive communities made up of billions or trillions of individuals.

Though some microbes are best known for their ability to make us sick -- for example, bacteria such as Streptococcus pneumonia can cause human pneumonia -- most of them are important for survival. The collection of such beneficial microorganisms within a specific habitat, whether that be your pet’s skin or the soil in your garden, is known as the “microbiota.”

Each member of the microbiota has its own instruction manual for making and maintaining life, called genes. Just as in us humans, this manual is comprised of genes that provide the code to dictate how microbes survive. Within the microbiota teeming in a specific environment, these genes are called the microbiome. The assemblage of genes in a microbiome is vast. In our gut, for instance, it outnumbers the number of human genes [1].

Scientists “read” these microbial genes like a book with sequencing techniques to identify the community in a given habitat. This helps us puzzle together what various types of microbes contribute to their environment, such as their roles in keeping us and our pets healthy.

Microbiomes have a wide impact on health

Microbes living in and on our pets can affect health in a variety of ways. In the gut, for example, bacteria assist with digestion [3]. Skin microbes may be important for preventing allergies [4]. Others, however, can make your pet sick or, in the case of bacteria living in their mouths, may affect the development of periodontal disease [5,6].

Although microbes with these extreme effects exist, most microbes are somewhere in between: some of them are slightly beneficial, some of them have no effect at all, and others are partially detrimental but not bad enough to make your pet sick.

This gets even more complicated when we think about how microbes affect each other and how their interactions may change the outcome with respect to health. For example, microbe X may help with food digestion only if microbe Y is absent. If microbe Y colonizes the gut, however, microbe X produces a toxin to kill microbe Y. The toxin may inadvertently cause inflammation of your pet’s intestinal walls -- an unpleasant side-effect of a microbial fight.

The gut microbiome’s relationship to overall health

Animal guts in particular are one place brimming with microorganisms. All animals -- including us, wild animals, domesticated livestock and our pets -- support an incredible number of intestinal microbes. In fact, current estimates suggest that the number of microbial cells in your gut is approximately equal to the number of human cells in your body [2].

Without these digestive tract-inhabiting microbes, our pets would be unable to digest all of their food. Researchers have also uncovered links to the gut microbiome that extend far beyond the gut. Your pet’s ability to fight infections, for instance, likely depends on a healthy microbiota facilitating how their immune system develops. Studies suggest that gut microbes may also send signals to the brain.

Conditions that affect gut health

The types of microbes living in your pet’s microbiota are carefully balanced. Imbalances, called “dysbiosis,” may play a role in the development of several conditions, including Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD)[7–10]), allergies [4,11], obesity [12], periodontal disease [5], and diabetes [13].

Myriad factors can cause these disruptions, including antibiotics, dietary changes, and stress [14–16]. Antibiotics, for example, have been essential for treating bacterial infections. But they also wreak havoc on the microbiota because they impact innocent microbial bystanders in addition to the one causing disease. Thus antibiotics can alter the abundance or presence of particular bacteria in the gut, thereby disrupting the normal function of the gut microbiota.

Other influences work similarly by upsetting the normal balance of microbiota. As more studies are conducted to identify the causes and consequences of disrupting the microbiota, scientists will be able to identify robust associations between changes in the microbiota and disease, and eventually identify effective treatments.

Changing the microbiota is often unavoidable. In order to prevent loss of beneficial gut microbes, scientists need to do all we can to improve our ability to return pets’ guts to a healthy, pre-disruption state.

Microbiome relationship to nutrition

Diet is a major driver of microbiome composition. Microbes in the gut help with digestion [3], which means that they eat what the animal they live in eats. Thus, diet and nutrition have a strong impact on the gut microbiota [17,18]. Can your pet eat specific foods or nutrients in order to maximize the number of beneficial microbes living in their guts? Can specific foods reduce the numbers of detrimental microbes or steer microbial interactions to have outcomes that are favorable for your pet’s health?

We cannot completely answer these questions until we conduct more research. But we do know that certain components of diet affect particular members of the gut microbiota in pets. For example, the amount of protein and carbohydrates that pets eat can steer the gut microbiota towards having more bacteria of the Firmicutes type [19]. Too much protein might negatively alter the gut microbiota and impact pet health [20]. Experiments with potato fiber in pet diets have also shown that this fiber source increased abundances of “good” gut bacteria [21,22].

Examining gut bacteria by “reading” their DNA sequences has now become much more affordable, paving the way for more studies to test particular dietary components for their effects on gut microbiota and overall health. Pet parents can now have their pets’ gut microbiome characterized in order to improve overall health.

If you’d like to learn more about the microbiome and how it relates to pets’ health. Head over to https://www.nomnomnow.com/learn/pet-microbiome.

References Cited

1. Qin J, Li R, Raes J, Arumugam M, Burgdorf KS, Manichanh C, et al. A human gut microbial gene catalogue established by metagenomic sequencing. Nature. 2010;464: 59–65. doi:10.1038/nature08821
2. Sender R, Fuchs S, Milo R. Are We Really Vastly Outnumbered? Revisiting the Ratio of Bacterial to Host Cells in Humans. Cell. 2016;164: 337–340. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2016.01.013
3. Flint HJ, Scott KP, Duncan SH, Louis P, Forano E. Microbial degradation of complex carbohydrates in the gut. Gut Microbes. 2012;3: 289–306. doi:10.4161/gmic.19897
4. Rodrigues Hoffmann A, Patterson AP, Diesel A, Lawhon SD, Ly HJ, Elkins Stephenson C, et al. The skin microbiome in healthy and allergic dogs. PLoS One. 2014;9: e83197. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0083197
5. Davis EM. Gene Sequence Analyses of the Healthy Oral Microbiome in Humans and Companion Animals. J Vet Dent. 2016;33: 97–107. doi:10.1177/0898756416657239
6. Adler CJ, Malik R, Browne GV, Norris JM. Diet may influence the oral microbiome composition in cats. Microbiome. 2016;4: 23. doi:10.1186/s40168-016-0169-y
7. Suchodolski JS, Dowd SE, Wilke V, Steiner JM, Jergens AE. 16S rRNA gene pyrosequencing reveals bacterial dysbiosis in the duodenum of dogs with idiopathic inflammatory bowel disease. PLoS One. 2012;7: e39333. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0039333
8. Kalenyak K, Isaiah A, Heilmann RM, Suchodolski JS, Burgener IA. Comparison of the intestinal mucosal microbiota in dogs diagnosed with idiopathic inflammatory bowel disease and dogs with food-responsive diarrhea before and after treatment. FEMS Microbiol Ecol. 2018;94. doi:10.1093/femsec/fix173
9. Vázquez-Baeza Y, Hyde ER, Suchodolski JS, Knight R. Dog and human inflammatory bowel disease rely on overlapping yet distinct dysbiosis networks. Nat Microbiol. 2016;1: 16177. doi:10.1038/nmicrobiol.2016.177
10. Minamoto Y, Otoni CC, Steelman SM, Büyükleblebici O, Steiner JM, Jergens AE, et al. Alteration of the fecal microbiota and serum metabolite profiles in dogs with idiopathic inflammatory bowel disease. Gut Microbes. 2015;6: 33–47. doi:10.1080/19490976.2014.997612
11. Craig JM. Atopic dermatitis and the intestinal microbiota in humans and dogs. Vet Med Sci. 2016;2: 95–105. doi:10.1002/vms3.24
12. Handl S, German AJ, Holden SL, Dowd SE, Steiner JM, Heilmann RM, et al. Faecal microbiota in lean and obese dogs. FEMS Microbiol Ecol. 2013;84: 332–343. doi:10.1111/1574-6941.12067
13. Bell ET, Suchodolski JS, Isaiah A, Fleeman LM, Cook AK, Steiner JM, et al. Faecal microbiota of cats with insulin-treated diabetes mellitus. PLoS One. 2014;9: e108729. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0108729
14. Myers SP. The causes of intestinal dysbiosis: a review. Altern Med Rev. 2004;9: 180–197. Available: http://anaturalhealingcenter.com/documents/Thorne/articles/intestinal_dysbiosis9-2.pdf
15. Estaki M, Quin C, Gibson DL. Diet and dysbiosis. In: Nibali L, Henderson B, editors. The Human Microbiota and Chronic Disease. Hoboken, NJ, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2016. pp. 443–465. doi:10.1002/9781118982907.ch29
16. Curtis M. An introduction to microbial dysbiosis. In: Nibali L, Henderson B, editors. The Human Microbiota and Chronic Disease. Hoboken, NJ, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; 2016. pp. 37–54. doi:10.1002/9781118982907.ch2
17. Turnbaugh PJ, Ridaura VK, Faith JJ, Rey FE, Knight R, Gordon JI. The effect of diet on the human gut microbiome: a metagenomic analysis in humanized gnotobiotic mice. Sci Transl Med. 2009;1: 6ra14. doi:10.1126/scitranslmed.3000322
18. Winglee K, Fodor AA. Intrinsic association between diet and the gut microbiome: current evidence. Nutr Diet Suppl. 2015;7: 69–76. doi:10.2147/NDS.S62362
19. Li Q, Lauber CL, Czarnecki-Maulden G, Pan Y, Hannah SS. Effects of the Dietary Protein and Carbohydrate Ratio on Gut Microbiomes in Dogs of Different Body Conditions. MBio. 2017;8. doi:10.1128/mBio.01703-16
20. Pinna C, Vecchiato CG, Zaghini G, Grandi M, Nannoni E, Stefanelli C, et al. In vitro influence of dietary protein and fructooligosaccharides on metabolism of canine fecal microbiota. BMC Vet Res. 2016;12: 53. doi:10.1186/s12917-016-0672-1
21. Panasevich MR, Kerr KR, Dilger RN, Fahey GC Jr, Guérin-Deremaux L, Lynch GL, et al. Modulation of the faecal microbiome of healthy adult dogs by inclusion of potato fibre in the diet. Br J Nutr. 2015;113: 125–133. doi:10.1017/S0007114514003274
22. Panasevich MR, Rossoni Serao MC, de Godoy MRC, Swanson KS, Guérin-Deremaux L, Lynch GL, et al. Potato fiber as a dietary fiber source in dog foods. J Anim Sci. 2013;91: 5344–5352. doi:10.2527/jas.2013-6842