Qinghai-Tibet Plateau(QTP) Animal Microbiome Database

Over the past 4.6 billion years, the earth has been nurturing a vast array of life. As many scientists believe, the creatures on the earth evolved from acellular life into unicellular organism, furthermore, into multicellular organism. In the meanwhile, the gut was gradually developed as one of digestive organs for multicellular animals and was colonized by plenty of microorganisms. For millions of years, the intestinal microorganisms experienced diffusion and horizontal gene transfer, natural selection and speciation. They behave as the "extended genome", of host, and profoundly affect animals' adaptation to new or extreme environments by influencing physiological processes of the host, such as development, immunity and metabolism. The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau(QTP), known as "the Third Pole of the Earth", is located at the world's highest elevation. The QTP is characterized by lower oxygen and lower temperature, stronger ultraviolet radiation and longer cold season. Although the QTP offers one of the most extreme environments for the survival of human and other animal species, it is the only polar region in which a wide variety of animals inhabit. Due to long-term natural selection, these animals have undergone convergent evolution, and gradually generated various physiological or morphological changes against multiple stresses from hypoxia, cold, as well as ultraviolet light and roughage. We believe, the gut microbiotas could assist the host to generate adaptive characteristics. Based on such "null hypothesis", our group members are committed to explore the mechanism by which gut microbiotas lead to the environmental adaptation for indigenous animals in the QTP. Via integrating the information of genome as well as metabolome and proteome of animal hosts and their gut commensals, we not only devote to dig out the specific bacterial species and function genes, but also figure out the causal relationship between the formation of adaptive characteristics and certain gut microbes, based on the theory of evolutionary genomics and systems biology. The intervention and regulation of gut microbiomes might facilitate the improvement of host traits. Due to this potential, we commit ourselves to the development of culture methods for uncultured microorganisms from gut, as well as the application of CRISPR technology to build engineered strains. Furthermore, using models like Caenorhabditis elegans, germ-free mice and pigs, we expect to establish a series of intervention strategies for microbial therapeutics by which we try to realize directed evolution of host phenotypes. Taken together, our research will contribute to protection and utilization of gut microorganisms of plateau animals, and ultimately promote the sustainable development of animal microbial biodiversity in the QTP.