Diversity of gut methanogens in herbivorous animals.

The digestion of plant biomass by symbiotic microbial communities in the gut of herbivore hosts also results in the production of methane, a greenhouse gas that is released into the environment where it contributes to climate change. As methane is exclusively produced by methanogenic archaea, various research groups have devoted their efforts to investigate the population structure of symbiotic methanogens in the gut of herbivores. In this review, we summarized and compared currently available results from 16S rRNA gene clone library studies, which cover a broad range of hosts from ruminant livestock species to wild ruminants, camelids, marsupials, primates, birds and reptiles. Although gut methanogens are very diverse, they tend to be limited to specific phylogenetic groups. Overall, methanogens related to species of the genus Methanobrevibacter are the most highly represented archaea in the gut of herbivores. However, under certain conditions, archaea from more phylogenetically distant groups are the most prevalent, such as methanogens belonging to either the genus Methanosphaera, the order Methanomicrobiales or the Thermoplasmatales-Affiliated Lineage C Comparisons not only highlight the strong influence of host species and diet in the determination of the population structure of symbiotic methanogens, but also reveal other complex relationships, such as wide differences between breeds, as well as unexpected similarities between unrelated species. These observations strongly support the need for high throughput sequencing and metagenomic studies to gain further insight.