Seasonal dynamics of diet–gut microbiota interaction in adaptation of yaks to life at high altitude

摘要

Within and among seasons, Bray–Curtis dissimilarity in diet and microbiota are presented in Supplementary Table 2. Rows show the same ordinations for diet (a and b) and microbiota (c and d) compositions. Diet composition and gut microbiota represent transhumance (a and c) and open-continuous grazing (b and d) regimes. Individual yak diet compositions from samples collected in (a) spring (n = 32), summer (n = 33), autumn (n = 37), and winter (n = 45) in transhumance grassland (anosim analysis: R = 0.94, p = 0.0001; adonis analysis: R2 = 0.78, p = 0.0001), (b) spring (n = 31), summer (n = 39), autumn (n = 38), and winter (n = 47) in open-continuous grazing grassland (anosim analysis: R = 0.88, p = 0.0001; adonis analysis: R2 = 0.67, p < 0.0001), and gut microbiota compositions in (c) spring (n = 31), summer (n = 31), autumn (n = 37) and winter (n = 48) in transhumance grassland (anosim analysis: R = 0.50, p < 0.0001; adonis analysis: R2 = 0.16, p < 0.0001) and (d) spring (n = 31), summer (n = 37), autumn (n = 38), winter (n = 47) in open-continuous grazing grassland (anosim analysis: R = 0.47, p < 0.0001; adonis analysis: R2 = 0.16, p < 0.0001) plotted on nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) according to the Bray–Curtis dissimilarity. Analysis of similarities (ANOSIM), adonis analysis and permutational multivariate analysis of variance (PERMANOVA) were used for statistical testing of treatment similarities. The dotted ellipse borders represent the 95% confidence interval.