PandaGUT Provides New Insights into Bacterial Diversity, Function, and Resistome Landscapes with Implications for Conservation

The gut microbiota play important roles in host adaptation and evolution, but are understudied in natural population of wild mammals. To address host adaptive evolution and improve conservation efforts of threatened mammals from a metagenomic perspective, we established a high-quality gut microbiome catalog of the giant panda (pandaGUT) to resolve the microbiome diversity, functional, and resistome landscapes using approximately 7 Tbp of long- and short-read sequencing data from 439 stool samples. The pandaGUT catalog comprises 820 metagenome-assembled genomes, including 40 complete closed genomes, and 64.5