Samples included in the study
Twenty-four piglets from three Spanish farms (eight per farm) were included in the study. Two of the farms (farms 1 and 2) performed vaccination against Glässer’s disease with a commercial bacterin (HIPRASUIS® GLÄSSER) by injecting 2ml/piglet at 3 and 6 weeks or at 2 and 5 weeks of age, respectively. In addition, in farm 2, sows were also vaccinated with the same vaccine before farrowing and penicillin was administered to the piglets at first day of life. To measure antibody levels, serum samples were taken before the first vaccination and 3 weeks after the second vaccination (9 and 8 weeks of age for farm 1 and 2, respectively). Nasal and rectal microbiota samples were obtained from swabs taken before the first vaccination. Similar times were used for the sampling of non-vaccinated pigs in a third farm (farm 3); i.e. microbiota samples at 1 week and serum samples at 1 and 9 weeks of age. Swabs were stored in 1000 µL DNA/RNA shield (Zymo Research) at 4ºC before further processing. These samples were also used in a previous study assessing gut-associated components of the nasal microbiota (27) and are available at NCBI’s SRA database under BioProject ID PRJNA981084.
Detection of G. parasuis by PCR
The presence of virulent and non-virulent strains of G. parasuis in the nasal samples was confirmed by PCR of the specific vtaA leader sequence, as described in Galofré-Milà, et al. (28), that allows the differentiation of virulent and non-virulent G. parasuis.
Antibody levels
Antibodies against G. parasuis were measured in serum using an in-house ELISA previously described (29). Plates were coated overnight at 4ºC with 250 ng of F4 (a protein fragment from the outer membrane proteins VtaA of G. parasuis) in 50 µl of carbonate-bicarbonate buffer per well. After washing, wells were blocked with 1% casein in phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) with 0.05% Tween 20 (PBS-Tw20). Sera were diluted 1:100 in blocking solution and added to the wells. After 1 h of incubation at 37ºC, wells were washed and incubated with a goat anti-porcine IgG HRP-conjugated antibody (Sigma-Aldrich, Madrid, Spain) diluted 1:10,000. Positive reactions in the ELISA were developed using the 3,3,3,5-tetramethylbenzidine (TMB) substrate (Sigma-Aldrich, Madrid, Spain) and the reactions were stopped with 1 N sulfuric acid. Plates were then read in a Power Wave XS spectrophotometer (Biotech, Winooski, VT, USA) at 450 nm.
A tentative classification into good (higher response) or bad (lower response) responders was performed in each group according to the variation between the initial level of antibodies and the level of antibodies at 8–9 weeks of age (delta antibody value, DAb). The piglets showing variations above the median of the group were considered as good responders and those below the median as bad responders. To deal with farm variability, this classification was done independently within each farm. There were two piglets that were not classified following these criteria. One piglet from farm 2 was considered a bad responder despite showing a DAb above the median, since it showed a clear reduction in the level of antibodies (from 1.197 to 0.605; delta = -0.592). We did not have the initial levels of antibodies for one piglet in farm 3, which was not included in the analyses using the DAb. Nevertheless, it was considered a bad responder according to its final level of antibodies in comparison to the rest of the animals in the farm. Hence, out of the twenty-four piglets, ten were considered to have a good response while fourteen were considered bad responders.
Microbiota sequencing
DNA was extracted from the nasal and rectal swabs following ZymoBIOMICS protocol, with the following modifications. Microbial cell lysis was performed by adding 700 µL of lysis buffer to 350 µL of sample, and DNA was eluted in 50 µL of elution buffer. DNA concentration was measured with a BioDrop DUO (BioDrop Ltd) and stored at -80ºC. A negative sample consisting of DNA/RNA shield alone was included as control.
The library preparation and Illumina sequencing were performed at Servei de Genòmica, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Variable regions 3 and 4 (V3-V4) from 16S rRNA gene were sequenced from genomic libraries prepared using Illumina recommended primers for these variable regions of the gene (fwd 5'TCGTCGGCAGCGTCAGATGTGTATAAGAGACAGCCTACGGGNGGCWGCAG, rev 5' GTCTCGTGGGCTCGGAGATGTGTATAAGAGACAGGACTACHVGGGTATCTAATCC) and following Illumina protocol (Illumina pair-end 2X300 bp, MS-102-2003 MiSeq Re285 agent Kit v2, 500 cycle). Sequenced amplicons lengths (expected 460 bp) were checked on a Bioanalyzer DNA 1000 chip (Agilent).
Microbiota bioinformatic analysis
The analysis of the 16S rRNA gene amplicons was performed using Quantitative Insights Into Microbial Ecology (QIIME) 2 software in its 2023.9 version (30). After importing the paired-end raw reads, primers were removed with q2 cutadapt (31), with the option to discard any sequence not containing the primers. Reads were denoised (quality filtered, paired-end merged, chimera cleaned and sorted into Amplicon Sequence Variants or ASVs) with DADA2 (32) used as a qiime2 plugin. Additionally, low quality positions at the 3’ end of the reads were removed. Three extra filtering steps were applied after denoising. The first one, to remove non-prokaryotic sequences with q2 quality control (33) by discarding all ASVs that did not match the Greengenes 13_8 database (34) clustered at 88% identity, after aligning with VSEARCH (35) under permissive parameters (65% identity and 50% query coverage). The second, to discard all sequences classified as Archaea, Chloroplast or Mitochondria. And third, all ASVs present in the negative control sample were removed from the analysis (21 ASVs; as previously done (27)) using ID-based filtering. The phylogenetic tree was built using FastTree (36) after aligning the remaining ASVs with MAFFT (37). Taxonomy was assigned to ASVs using a scikit-learn naïve Bayes classifier (38), previously trained against V3-V4 16S rRNA gene region to increase its accuracy (39) using the same Greengenes 13_8 database (clustered at 99% identity). Functional genes present in the predicted metagenome were inferred with PICRUST2 (40) and mapped to KEGG database (41) modules.
The diversity analysis was done at a common depth of 76,253, corresponding to the lowest sampling depth using q2 diversity. The alpha diversity of the samples was measured with Shannon (42) and Chao1 (43) indexes and the beta diversity with Jaccard (44) and Bray-Curtis (45) dissimilarity indexes (qualitative and quantitative, respectively). The correlation of the vaccine response with alpha diversity indexes was calculated with Spearman correlation coefficient (46) with cor.test function in Stats R package (47) version 4.3.1. Correlation between beta diversity and vaccine response (antibody delta) was computed with Mantel test (999 permutations) included in q2 diversity beta-correlation (48). Correlations between taxa/functional modules and antibody response were inferred using Maaslin2 R package (49) filtering taxa with less than 0.01 abundance and the rest of the parameters set to default, using abundances normalized relatively per sample as input. After Benjamini-Hochberg correction, significance was considered when q < 0.05.
In the discrete comparative analysis (good against bad responders), alpha diversity differences between groups were estimated by pairwise non-parametric t-tests (999 random permutations) using q2 diversity alpha-group significance (50). In the beta diversity discrete analysis, the Principal Coordinate Analysis (PCoA) was computed with q2 diversity core-metrics (51, 52), which was visualized in R with qiime2R package (53). The significance of beta diversity comparisons was tested by PERMANOVA pairwise tests (999 permutations), and the percentage of explanation of the studied variables using Adonis function from Vegan R software package (54), using q2 diversity beta-group-significance (55). For all mentioned tests, P values lower than 0.05 were considered significative.
The healthy swine nasal core microbiota was obtained by filtering all ASVs from the most prevalent genera in healthy pigs as described previously (56). Briefly, all ASVs not classified within the stated genera were filtered out using q2 feature-table filtering options. The prevalence threshold to consider a specific genus as core-microbiota was set to 80%. To find taxa differentially abundant on the remaining nasal core-microbiota between good and bad responders we used Lefse (57) under its default parameters to perform a Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). Taxa showing a LDA score > 2 between the two groups were considered as significantly different.
R script language (version 4.2.2) was used in RStudio environment (version 2022.07.0) (58) to process Qiime2 microbiome generated data as well as to generate plots using qiime2r, ggplot2 (59), tidyverse (60) and reshape2 (61) packages.
Statistical modelling
Prior to undertaking statistical analysis, microbiota composition at order level was screened for unlikely or missing values. No data were excluded on this basis. Subsequently, a descriptive statistical analysis was carried out to the nasal and rectal microbiota composition based on the relative abundance of ASVs for both DNA and RNA. We ran two different statistical models of nasal microbiota including a multivariable logistic regression model with the variation (DAb) in vaccine response into good (better response) or bad (worse response) responders as the outcome variable and a multivariable linear regression with the actual value of the DAb in vaccine response as the continuous outcome variable. This has been applied for both microbiota composition based on nasal and rectal samples. Initially, a univariable model was carried out to test the unconditional associations between dependent and various independent variables (relative abundances of members of the nasal microbiota). Only independent variables with P ≤ 0.25 in this initial screening were included in multivariable logistic and linear regression models in accordance with Dohoo et al. (62). To account for the farm variations, an additional model was developed accounting for farm as a random effect for each of nasal and rectal DNA and RNA using generalized mixed models. For each model, the significant independent variables from the univariable analysis were then offered to a multivariable model and a manual backward elimination was implemented, to obtain a final model that exclusively included variables with a P value < 0.05, considered as significant. The P value and the regression coefficient (b) with a 95% confidence interval (95% CI) were reported for each variable. In a similar approach, we developed a model following the same analysis for relative abundances of members of the rectal microbiota. In all statistical analyses, the results were regarded as significant at P ≤ 0.05. All statistical analyses were conducted using the R version 3.3.3 software.