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Panda poo reveals key to staying healthy and chubby

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Despite the fact that bamboo is a low-fat meal, giant pandas may benefit from a seasonal dietary transition from bamboo leaves to bamboo shoots.

The big panda survives solely on fibrous bamboo and remains plump and healthy.

Researchers report in the journal Cell Reports that changes in the bear’s gut microbiota during the season when nutritious bamboo shoots become available to help the herbivorous bear gain more weight and store more fat, possibly compensating for the lack of nutrients in seasons when only bamboo leaves are available.

“This is the first time we established a causal relationship between a panda’s gut microbiota and its phenotype,” said first author Guangping Huang. “We’ve known these pandas have a different set of gut microbiota during the shoot-eating season for a long time, and it’s very obvious that they are chubbier during this time of the year.”

As a result of changes in the food supply, many animals experience a seasonal shift in gut flora.

For instance, several monkey species have a different gut microbiota in the summer when they have access to fresh leaves and fruits than they do in the winter when they subsist on tree bark.

A similar transition is seen in the Hadza people, modern hunter-gatherers living in Tanzania, as the type of available food changes over the year.

The team, led by Fuwen Wei of the Institute of Zoology, has been studying wild giant pandas in the Qinling Mountains of central China for decades. These creatures eat fibrous bamboo leaves for most of the year. They do, however, get to eat newly sprouting bamboo shoots, which are high in protein, in the late spring and early summer.

Wei claims that during the shoot-eating season, these wild pandas had a considerably higher amount of a bacterium called Clostridium butyricum in their intestines than during the leaf-eating season. To determine whether changes in the panda’s gut microbiota could alter its metabolism, the researchers performed a fecal transplant of panda feces taken in the wild into germ-free mice. After that, the mice were fed for three weeks on a bamboo-based diet to mimic what pandas eat.

Despite eating the same amount of food, mice transplanted with panda feces taken during shoot-eating season developed much more weight and fat than mice transplanted with excrement collected during leaf-eating season. Further research indicated that the metabolic product of C. butyricum, butyrate, can boost lipid synthesis and storage by upregulating the expression of a circadian rhythm gene called Per2. Pandas’ gut microbiota alters seasonally, synchronizing the host’s peripheral circadian rhythm and altering lipid metabolism.

“For endangered and vulnerable wild animals, we can’t really run tests on them directly. Our research created a mouse model for future fecal transplant experiments that can help study wild animals’ gut microbiota,” Huang adds.

The team’s next goal is to identify more bacteria in the panda’s gut and learn more about how they affect the animal’s health.

“Causal research of host phenotype and gut microbiota in wild animals is just beginning. Identifying what bacteria are beneficial for animals is very important, because one day we may be able to treat some diseases with probiotics,” says Huang.

Source: 10.1016/j.celrep.2021.110203

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