Modulation of Gut Microbiota & Microbiome in Pigs

Dear Colleagues,

I am pleased to have this opportunity to guest-edit a Special Issue on “Gut Microbiota and Microbiome in Pigs” with implications for controlling porcine gut pathogen and improving porcine gut health, swine nutrition, and efficiency of pork production and for mitigating major negative impacts of intensive pork production on environment.

While next-generation sequencing (NGS) platforms have been widely used to unravel porcine gut microbial diversity and microbial genes primarily at fecal levels as affected by dietary, therapeutic, and physiological factors, new progress needs to be made to establish causal relationships between functional outcomes and gut microbial species or their genes along the small and large intestinal longitudinal axis. The application of NGS platforms to reveal how changes in porcine gut virome are linked to host health and functions is also important.

This Special Issue invites focused reviews and original research in i) looking at how dietary such as exogenous enzymes, prebiotics and probiotics, therapeutics such as antibiotics and pharmacological levels of zinc oxide, and physiological factors such as cold or thermal stress affect porcine gut microbial diversity; ii) identifying specific bacterial species and viruses causing health and productivity concerns, such as weaning-associated gut dysbiosis, diarrhea, and growth lag; and iii) establishing possible causal relationships between functional outcomes, such as fiber digestion, fermentation of amino acids and biogenesis of major volatile odor compounds and antimicrobial resistance, and abundances of identified gut microbes at phylum or species level and rate-limiting microbial pathway genes in the porcine gut.

Prof. Dr. Ming Z. Fan
Prof. Dr. Sung Woo Kim
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Pathogens is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.