Reproducible Colonization of Germ-Free Mice With the Oligo-Mouse-Microbiota in Different Animal Facilities

Reproducible Colonization of Germ-Free Mice With the Oligo-Mouse-Microbiota in Different Animal Facilities

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The Oligo-Mouse-Microbiota (OMM12) is a recently developed synthetic bacterial community for functional microbiome research in mouse models (Brugiroux et al., 2016).To date, the OMM12 model has been established in several germ-free mouse facilities world-wide and is employed to address a growing variety of research questions related to infection biology, mucosal immunology, microbial ecology and host-microbiome metabolic cross-talk.The OMM12 325 consists of 12 sequenced and publically available strains isolated from mice, representing five bacterial phyla that are naturally abundant in the murine gastrointestinal tract (Lagkouvardos et al.

, 2016).Under germ-free conditions, the OMM12 colonizes mice stably over multiple generations.Here, we investigated whether stably colonized OMM12 mouse lines could be reproducibly established in different animal facilities.Germ-free C57Bl/6J mice were inoculated with a frozen mixture of the OMM12 strains.

Within 2 weeks after application, the OMM12 BENCH community reached the same stable composition in all facilities, as determined by fecal microbiome analysis.We show that a second application of the OMM12 strains after 72 h leads to a more stable community composition than a single application.The availability of such protocols for reliable de novo generation of gnotobiotic rodents will certainly contribute to increasing experimental reproducibility in biomedical research.