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Guinea pigs have historically been used as a food source and are also an important model for studying the human intestines. Fasting is the act of temporarily stopping the intake of food. This process can alter the microbiota of various animals. This study is the first to investigate the impact of fasting on the cecum microbiome of three guinea pig breeds. We investigated the impact of fasting on the microbiome population structure in the cecum of three guinea pig breeds. This was done by sequencing and analyzing the V4 hypervariable region of the 16S rRNA gene in bacterial communities found in cecum mucosa samples. To achieve this, we established two treatment groups (fasting and fed), for each of the three guinea pig breeds: Andina, Inti, and Peru. The study involved twenty-eight guinea pigs, which were divided into the following groups: Andina-fed (five), Andina-fasting (five), Inti-fed (four), Inti-fasting (five), Peru-fed (five), and Peru-fasting (four). The results indicated a significant difference in beta diversity between the treatment groups for the Peru breed (P-value = 0.049), but not for the treatment groups of the Andina and Inti breeds. The dominant phyla across all groups were Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes. We observed variations in the abundance of different taxa in the cecum microbiota when comparing the treatment groups for each breed. Additionally, there was a higher number of unique taxa observed in the fasting groups compared to the fed groups. We discovered that the genus Victivallis was the only one present in all fasting groups across all breeds. Despite the findings, the resilience of the gutmicrobiome was not challenged in all three breeds, which can lead to disruptive changes that may affect the overall maintenance of the cecum microbiome. Based on the observed differences in the treatment groups of the Peru breed, it can be suggested that fasting has a greater impact on this particular breed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the effect of host genetics on the structure and composition of the cecum microbiota of three breeds of guinea pigs: Andina, Inti, and Peru. Fifteen guinea pigs were distributed into three groups according to their breed: Andina (5), Inti (5), and Peru (5). We discovered that four main phyla were shared between the three breeds: Bacteroidota, Firmicutes, Spirochaetota, and Synergistota. Although there were no significant differences in the alpha and beta diversity analysis, we found that the Linear discriminant analysis effect size and the heat tree analysis showed significant differences between the abundance of several taxa present in the cecum microbiome of the three breeds. These results suggest that host genetics could be a factor in the structure and composition of the guinea pig cecum microbiome. In addition, we found unique genera for each breed that have fermentation capacity and, therefore can be analyzed in further studies to determine if there is a functional relationship between them and the breed and its industrial profile., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2023. Published by Elsevier Ltd.)