Effect of Repeated Suboptimal Chlorate Treatment on Ruminal and Fecal Bacterial Diversity

The minimal effective dose of sodium chlorate as an intervention to reduce the carriage of pathogenic bacteria in food-producing animals has not been clearly established. The effect of low-level oral chlorate administration to ewes was assessed by comparing the diversity of prominent bacterial populations in their gastrointestinal tract. Twelve lactating crossed Pelibuey and Blackbelly-Dorper ewes (average body weight, 65 kg) were randomly assigned (four per treatment) to receive a control treatment (TC; consisting of 3 g of NaCl per animal per day) or one of two chlorate treatments (T3 or T9; consisting of 1.8 or 5.4 g of NaClO3 per animal per day, respectively). Treatments were administered twice daily via oral gavage for 5 days. Ruminal and fecal samples were collected daily, starting 3 days before and ending 6 days after treatment, and were subjected to denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis of the 16S rRNA gene sequence amplified from total population DNA. For ruminal microbes, percent similarity coefficients (SCs) between groups varied from 23.0 to 67.5% and from 39.4 to 43.3% during pretreatment and treatment periods, respectively. During the treatment period, SCs within groups ranged from 39.4 to 90.3%, 43.3 to 86.7%, and 67.5 to 92.4% for TC, T3, and T9, respectively. For fecal microbes, SCs between groups varied from 38.0 to 85.2% and 38.0 to 94.2% during pretreatment and treatment periods, respectively. SCs for fecal populations during treatment were most varied for TC (38.0 to 67.9%), intermediate for T9 (75.6 to 92.0%), and least varied for T3 (80.6 to 90.6%). Heterogeneity within and between groups provided no evidence of an effect of chlorate treatment on ruminal or fecal microbial populations.