Modulation of Gut Microbiota and Microbiome in Pigs: 2nd Edition

Dear Colleagues,

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

While next-generation sequencing (NGS) platforms have been widely used to unravel porcine gut microbial diversity and microbial genes primarily at fecal levels that are affected by dietary, therapeutic, and physiological factors, new progress needs to be made to establish the 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 i) assessing how dietary factors such as exogenous enzymes, prebiotics, and probiotics; therapeutic factors such as antibiotics and the pharmacological levels of zinc oxide; and physiological factors such as cold or thermal stress affect the porcine gut microbial diversity; ii) identifying the specific bacterial species and viruses causing health and productivity concerns, such as weaning-associated gut dysbiosis, diarrhea, and growth lag; and iii) establishing the possible causal relationships between functional outcomes, such as fiber digestion, the fermentation of amino acids, and the biogenesis of the major volatile metabolic, regulatory, and odor compounds and antimicrobial resistance and the associated genes, and the abundances of the identified gut microbes at the phylum or species level and the rate-limiting microbial pathway genes in the porcine gut.

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

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