The extraction of bacterial DNA from the samples of caecal contents was performed as described previously34 (link). The hypervariable V1–V2 region of the 16 S gene was amplified by PCR with barcoded 27Fmod (5′-AGRGTTTGATYMTGGCTCAG-3′) and reverse primer 338R35 (link) (5′-TGCTGCCTCCCGTAGGAGT-3′) and then sequenced using the 454 GS FLX Titanium or 454 GS Junior system (Roche Applied Science). Operational taxonomic unit (OTU) clustering, taxonomy assignment and UniFrac analysis were performed as described previously36 (link).
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