THE EFFECT OF NUTRITIONAL PROGRAMMING ON GUT MICROBIOME IN ZEBRAFISH Danio rerio

Nutritional programming (NP) is looked at as a promising approach that can counteract the negative effects of dietary plant protein (PP) by introducing PP to fish in the early developmental stages and enhancing PP utilization later in life. However, the mechanism of NP is still unclear. The objective of our study was to assess the effect of NP on the gut microbiome  in  zebrafish Danio rerio .

At 4 days post hatch (dph) zebrafish larvae were randomly distributed into 12 (3 L) tanks, 157±16 larvae per tank. The study included four treatment groups: 1) A positive control group that received a fishmeal diet (FM) throughout the entire trial (+ control); 2) A negative control group that received PP diet throughout the entire trial (-control); 3) A NP group that received dietary PP during the larval stage followed by FM-based diet during the juvenile stage and PP diet again during a PP challenge in the grow-out phase (NP-PP); and 4) A FM-group that received FM-based diet and was challenged with a PP diet during the grow-out phase (NP-FM).

During the PP challenge the NP-PP group achieved the highest weight gain compared to the (- ) control and NP-FM groups. At the end of the study, there were no significant differences between groups in relative abundance (RA) of the overall gut microbiome. However, some differences were detected in RA of particular phyla .  The RA of Bacteroidetes was significantly higher in (- ) control compared to the (+) control but not different with the other groups at 26 dph . Similarly, the RA of Planctomycetes was found higher at 26 dph in the (- ) control group  compared to all other groups.  The study showed that NP does not affect the  overall gut microbiome in zebrafish but certain phyla are influenced by continuous dietary PP exposure throughout fish life.