Seasonal changes in intestinal viruses
Although several studies have shown that gut microbiota significantly contributes to the host's adaptation to season, there has been less research on the impact of gut viruses, especially in plateau wildlife. As a result, our research gathered data on plateau pikas (Ochotona Curzniae, PP) and plateau zokor (Myospalax rufecens baileyi, PZ) from the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau over 2.5 years, spanning five seasons. The PP lives on the ground, while the PZ lives underground. We examined the nutritional components of PP and PZ in both the cold and warm seasons, and used 16S rRNA and metagenomic sequencing to detect the gut bacterial and viral communities. We found that the gut viral diversity in the PP exhibited a cyclical pattern with the seasons, with significantly higher diversity in the warm season compared to the cold season, while no such variation was observed in PZ. The assembly process of the PP gut virus community was primarily stochastic, while PZ was mainly deterministic process. Bacterial communities were enriched with more CAZymes enzyme genes, especially the genes for degrading difficult-to-degrade polysaccharides (cellulose, hemicellulose, etc). Compared to PZ, there were more of these special CAZymes enzyme genes in PP, especially during the cold season. The co-occurrence networks showed that more viruses parasitized bacteria during the warm season. Our research findings emphasized that the intestinal viruses of plateau wildlife varied with the seasons, especially in wildlife that lives on the ground.