Predictable and host-species specific humanization of the gut microbiota in captive primates

Jennifer L. Houtz¹†, Jon G. Sanders¹, Anthony Denice^2,3, Andrew H. Moeller¹†

¹Cornell University, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Ithaca, New York 14850, USA

²Project Chimps, Blue Ridge, Georgia 30513, USA

³Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest, Cle Elum, Washington 98922, USA

†corresponding author: jlh498@cornell.edu, ahm226@cornell.edu

Abstract: Humans and non-human primates (NHPs) harbor complex gut microbial communities that affect phenotypes and fitness. The gut microbiotas of wild NHPs reflect their hosts’ phylogenetic histories and are compositionally distinct from those of humans, but in captivity the endogenous gut microbial lineages of NHPs can be lost or replaced by lineages found in humans. Despite its potential contributions to gastrointestinal dysfunction, this humanization of the gut microbiota has not been investigated systematically across captive NHP species. Here we show through comparisons of well-sampled wild and captive populations of apes and monkeys that the fraction of the gut microbiota humanized by captivity varies significantly between NHP species but is remarkably reproducible between captive populations of the same NHP species. Conspecific captive populations displayed significantly greater than expected overlap in the sets of bacterial 16S rRNA gene variants that were differentially abundant between captivity and the wild. This overlap was evident even between captive populations residing on different continents but was never observed between heterospecific captive populations. In addition, we developed an approach incorporating human gut microbiota data to rank NHPs’ gut microbial clades based on the propensity of their lineages to be lost or replaced by lineages found in humans in captivity. Relatively few microbial genera displayed reproducible degrees of humanization in different captive host species, but most microbial genera were reproducibly humanized or retained from the wild in conspecific pairs of captive populations. These results demonstrate that the gut microbiotas of captive NHPs display predictable, host-species specific responses to captivity.