Gut Microbiota of Food Animal

Dear Colleagues,

As ensuring food security remains one of our generation’s main global challenges, food animals’ contribution has been recognized as essential in meeting the demands of a rapidly growing and urbanizing global population. However, increasing animal production presents several challenges, ranging from mitigating disease outbreaks and ensuring animal health to improving feed efficiency, while minimizing its impact on the environment. In the gut reside complex microbial communities that play essential roles in ensuring the health of their host, contributing to various functions such as disease resistance and nutrition. While it has been the subject of a sustained research effort for many years, elucidating the complexities of the gut microbiota remains a challenging subject for basic and applied scientists.

In this context, I am pleased to invite you to contribute to the “Gut Microbiota of Food Animals” Special Issue, aiming to present original research or perspectives on the microbial communities which reside in the gut of food animals. Suitable host species can range from aquatic species to poultry, swine, or ruminants, but studies involving wild, feral, or companion animal species will be considered out of scope.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome on research areas that may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• composition and/or functional dynamics of gut bacterial, archaeal, protozoal, and/or fungal communities from food animal hosts in response to dietary treatments or other conditions;
• host–microbiota interactions;
• interactions amongst microbial species or groups;
• microbial ecology of the gut environment.

I look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Benoit St Pierre
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Microorganisms is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• food animals
• gut health
• microbiota
• microbial ecology
• metagenomics
• bioinformatics
• metabolomics
• culturomics