Industrialization restructures the domestic dog gut microbiome while preserving host specificity.

Industrialized domestic dogs show directional genus-level and guild shifts in gut bacterial communities, linked most strongly to lifestyle across 257 antibiotic-free dogs.

• Why it matters: Most canine microbiome work has emphasized industrialized pet or controlled settings, leaving the ecological range of dog gut communities under different human-associated lifestyles unclear.
• What they did: Fecal 16S rRNA profiles from 261 dogs across Nepal, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States were analyzed, with 257 remaining after excluding recent antibiotic exposure.
• The result: Lifestyle was the strongest correlate of canine gut composition, with industrialized dogs differing from non-industrialized dogs in coabundance structure and predicted functional potential, while cross-species comparisons showed parallel lifestyle restructuring but host species dominance.

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