PRJNA379878,
Diet and exercise are conventional methods for controlling body weight and are linked to alterations in gut microbiota. However, the associations of diet, exercise, and gut microbiota in the control of obesity remain largely unknown. In the present study, using 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing and fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), normal fat diet (NFD), exercise and their combination resulted in improved metabolic profiles in comparison to sedentary lifestyle with high fat diet (HFD). Moreover, diet exerted more influence than exercise in shaping the gut microbiota. HFD-fed mice receiving FMT from NFD-exercised donors not only showed remarkably reduced food efficacy, but also mitigated metabolic profiles (p < 0.05). The transmissible beneficial effects of FMT were associated with bacterial genera Helicobacter, Odoribacter and AF12 and overrepresentation of oxidative phosphorylation and glycolysis genes. Our findings demonstrate that the beneficial effects of diet and exercise are transmissible via FMT, suggesting a potential therapeutic treatment for obesity.

Sequence files and metadata of all samples have been deposited in National Center for Biotechnology Information Sequence Read Archive under accession number SRP102269, affiliated with BioProject PRJNA379878. The metadata, OTU and taxonomy tables, and COGs and annotation tables (predicted by PICRUSt) have also been deposited in Figshare (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5513548), and serve as input data for the R code in Supplementary dataset used to perform all statistical analyses in this manuscript.