Abstract
A dog-associated 16S rDNA genetic marker (ED-1) was designed to detect dog fecal contamination in water through a comparative bioinformatics analysis of Faecalibacterium sequences. For the dog fecal samples, ED-1 had 100% specificity, a high positive rate (89% in dog feces and 92.3% in dog fecal–contaminated water samples), and a low detection limit (107 copies/100 mL) in dog-contaminated water samples. Detection of water samples from seven provinces or cities of China showed that ED-1 was stable enough to be applied in practice. Furthermore, the abundance and diversity of dog gut microbiota from two private house pets (PHP) and Third Military Medical University (TMMU) dogs were estimated by using operational taxonomic units, and the significant differences of dog feces were found, as the PHP dogs have a more diverse diet and closer contact with human than dogs in TMMU. However, ED-1 could detect the feces from the two regions, indicating that ED-1 has good reliability.
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Data availability
The sequence data has been uploaded to NCBI (https://dataview.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?search=SUB4574077).
Abbreviations
- WHO:
-
World Health Organization;
- UNICEF:
-
United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund
- FIB:
-
fecal indicator bacteria
- TMMU:
-
Third Military Medical University
- PHP:
-
private house pets
- RDP:
-
Ribosomal Database Project Classifier
- HTS:
-
High-throughput sequencing
- DL:
-
detection limit
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the Third Military Medical University and pet owners for the help in collecting fecal samples. Thanks to all the volunteers in this study.
Funding
Chuanren Duan received financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51208533), The Basic and Advanced Technology Research Program of Chongqing (Grant No. cstc2015jcyjBX0111), The Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 106112015CDJZR235504), The Chongqing Science & Technology Commission (Grant No. 0221002432528), and The Science and Technique project of Wenzhou City (Grant No. W20170010).
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KZ, DS, CRD, and BYZ designed the study. KZ, HC, and DS collected the fecal samples. An original manuscript was written by KZ and some important intellectual content were revised by HC, AUD, XJK, and QX. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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In this experiment, we just collected fecal samples from six species (chickens, ducks, humans, dogs, pigs, cows), and there was no human intervention in the excretion process. We declare that any animal experiment was not involved in the study. The authors committed that animal housing and surgical procedures were not involved in the study, and all of the animal owners have been informed that the fecal samples would be used for the experiment.
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ESM 1
The species composition map of six species. The map was made with Krona software (https://github.com/marbl/Krona/wiki). The circle represents the five classification levels of phylum, class, order, family, and genus from inside to outside, and the size of sector reflects the relative abundance of different classification units. The blue and purple parts represent and Firmicutes and Faecalibacterium, respectively. (JPG 988 kb)
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Zhang, K., Sun, D., Duan, C. et al. Application of a Faecalibacterium 16S rDNA genetic marker for species identification of dog fecal waste. Environ Sci Pollut Res 27, 30615–30624 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-09369-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-09369-w