Forbush, Micah; Gold, Roger (Southern Utah University)
Faculty Advisor: Gold, Roger (Southern Utah University, Biology)
The health of a horse's teeth and oral cavity is strongly correlated with the horse's overall health and well-being. As a horse ages the oral cavity undergoes many distinct physical changes, which may lead to changes in the composition of the oral microbiome as well. While there has been extensive research performed on the oral microbiomes of healthy horses compared to horses with various oral diseases, very little is known about normal changes to the horse oral microbiome as they age. The aim of this study was to use high-throughput sequencing to compare the oral microbiomes of horses in different age categories. Total genomic DNA was isolated from oral swabs taken from horses in the 7 day-old, 1-7 years old, 8-15 years old and 16+ years old age categories. The V3-V4- region of the 16S rRNA gene was amplified by PCR and amplicons were submitted for paired-end sequencing on the Illumina HiSeq system. Sample reads were analyzed using the QIIME 2.0 microbiome bioinformatics platform and overall bacterial diversity was compared among age classes.