Abstract:[Background] Gut flora influences the nutrient digestion and absorption, immunity, and behavior of the host and is impacted by the diet, living environment, and other factors of the host. [Objective] Food-provisioning can improve the nutrition in wild animals, but a few reports on the impact on gut flora are available. [Methods] Through high-throughput sequencing of the fresh feces of wild and food-provisioned snub-nosed monkeys in the Baima Snow Mountain National Nature Reserve in Yunnan, we explored the effect of food-provisioning on gut flora of the monkeys. [Results] Food-provisioning significantly increased the richness, evenness, and phylogenetic diversity of the gut flora and reduced the variance of community composition among monkey individuals. linear discriminant analysis effect size (LEfSe) analysis revealed that food-provisioning significantly changed the relative abundance of 20 bacterial taxa. To be specific, it increased the abundance of 8 taxa, such as Firmicutes, and decreased the abundance of 12 taxa, including Proteobacteria and Bacteroidetes. The correlation network analysis revealed that wild monkey group had more complex and robust microbial correlation network. Kyoto encyclopedia of genes and genomes (KEGG) functional prediction found that food-provisioning mainly reduced the degradation ability as it added highly degradable nutrients. [Conclusion] Food-provisioning influences multiple aspects of gut flora of Yunnan snub-nosed monkeys, particularly the biodiversity, community composition, and correlation network.
