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. 2020 Feb 12;10:2497. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-59104-1

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© The Author(s) 2020

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Summary figure representing the study design and major results. Angus steers (n = 12) were allowed to graze either a toxic (E+; n = 6) or non-toxic (Max-Q; n = 6) tall fescue pastures throughout a 26-day grazing trial. Samples were collected on dates where there was no risk of heat stress (−THI) and where there was a mild-to-moderate risk of heat stress (+THI). Plasma and urine samples were analyzed by high-resolution metabolomics (HRM) and fecal samples were subjected to next-generation sequencing techniques targeting the 16S rRNA gene. With bioinformatics, we found significant perturbations of both the metabolome and the microbiota, which were modulated by +THI conditions only in E+ steers. Further, only E+ steers in thermoneutral conditions had a significant correlation/covariance between the microbiota and metabolome and sparse partial least squares regression revealed three OTUs that were predictive of E+, regardless of environmental conditions and were highly correlated with plasma/urine metabolites. We propose the further exploration of these as biomarkers of an E+ microbiota associated with production deficits that could possibly be targeted therapeutically.