Statements & Declarations
Funding: This work was partially funded by the European
Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the COMPETE program and by
National Funds through FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology
(project PTDC/BIA-MIC/27995/2017 POCI01-0145- FEDER-027995); RX was
supported by FCT under the Programa Operacional Potencial Humano –
Quadro de Referência Estratégico Nacional funds from the European Social
Fund and Portuguese Ministério da Educação e Ciência
(2020.00854.CEECIND/CP1601/CT0001), AP was supported by FCT
(SFRH/BD/144928/2019) .
Competing Interests: The authors have no competing interests.
Author Contributions: All authors contributed to the writing of
the manuscript; DV collected samples, performed laboratory work and
analyzed the data; DJH conceived the work, collected samples and
contributed with funding; ID-M collected samples; AP performed
laboratory work; RX conceived the work, supervised data analysis and
contributed with funding.
Data Availability: Data will be deposited in NCBI’s Short Read
Archive (SRA) upon acceptance.
Ethics approval: Experimental protocols and research were
approved by the Portuguese Institute for Conservation of Nature and
Forests (ICNF) (License 703/2021/CAPT).
Table 1 - Results from the pairwise PERMANOVA testing the
effect of species and sex in gut microbial beta-diversity
(R2 and respective adjusted p-values). Significant
results are depicted in bold.