Gut Microbiome Dataset of Captive Giant Pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) in Zoo Negara Malaysia

Abstract The microbiome of an animal is prone to microbial composition changes that may be affected by dietary and environmental changes that the animal have experienced. This article presents the complete analysis of gut microbiome for a pair of captive giant pandas in Zoo Negara, Malaysia. Microbial DNA were extracted from giant pandas faecal sample and shotgun sequencing was performed using Illumina MiSeq platform. The resulting metagenome sequences was uploaded and processed through the publicly available pipeline provided by MG-RAST database. At the domain level, bacteria domain is the most abundant domain in both male (98%) and female (95%) samples. At genus level, Escherichia is the most abundant representing 86% and 77% of the metagenome for male and female respectively. Other prominent genus in both samples include Shigella (M: 7.6%, F: 8.2%), Salmonella (M: 1.3%, F: 2.1%) and Citrobacter (M: 0.8%, F: 1.6%). For functional annotation, most of the reads annotate to carbohydrate (M: 19%%, F: 19%) followed by clustering based subsystems (M: 14%, F: 15%) and amino acids and derivatives (M: 10%%, F: 11%). This data provide the baseline for studying the microbiome changes in captive giant panda in a changing environment.