Gut microbiota dynamics in carnivorous European seabass (Dicentrarchus labrax) fed plant-based diets

A healthy gastrointestinal microbiota is essential for host fitness, and strongly modulated by host diet. In aquaculture, a current challenge is to feed carnivorous fish with plant-feedstuffs in substitution of fish meal, an unsustainable commodity. Plants have a limited nutritive value due to the presence of non-starch polysaccharides (NSP) which are not metabolized by fish. In this work we assessed the effects of NSP-enriched diets on European seabass gut microbiota and evaluate the selective pressure of plant feedstuffs towards gut microbes with NSP-hydrolytic potential, i.e. capable to convert indigestible dietary constituents in fish metabolites. Triplicate groups of European seabass juveniles were fed a fish meal-based diet (control) or three plant-based diets (SBM, soybean meal; RSM, rapeseed meal; SFM, sunflower meal) for 6 weeks, before recovering intestinal samples for microbiota analysis, using the Illumina’s MiSeq platform. Plant-based diets impacted differently digesta and mucosal microbiota. A decrease (p = 0.020) on species richness, accompanied by a decline on the relative abundance of specific phyla such as Acidobacteria (p = 0.030), was observed in digesta samples of SBM and RSM experimental fish, but no effects were seen in mucosa-associated microbiota. Plant-based diets favored the Firmicutes (p = 0.01), in particular the Bacillaceae (p = 0.017) and Clostridiaceae (p = 0.007), two bacterial families known to harbor carbohydrate active enzymes and thus putatively more prone to grow in high NSP environments. Overall, bacterial gut communities of European seabass respond to plant-feedstuffs with adjustments in the presence of transient microorganisms (allochthonous) with carbohydrolytic potential, while maintaining a balanced core (autochthonous) microbiota.