RESEARCH ARTICLE

se cultivation, understanding of the functions of the mam- constitute better models than other rodents. For example, Hildebrand et al. BMC Genomics 2012, 13:514 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/13/514that the composition of the intestinal microbiota plays a19, Soeborg 2860, DenmarkFull list of author information is available at the end of the articlemalian intestinal bacterial community is still very limited (see e.g. [1,2]). Recently, next generation sequencing techniques have been applied to characterize the intestinal microbiota of humans [3-5] as well as a number of mammalian species [6-10]. unlike that of mice and rats, the E-cadherin on the intes-tinal surface of guinea pigs is homologous to that of humans. This renders these animals one of the most suitable models in studies of infections with the im-portant human pathogen Listeria monocytogenes, because E-cadherin serves as the primary receptor interacting with this bacterium upon initiation of intestinal invasion [11], and they are frequently used as such [12-14]. However, only few studies exist, which describe the intestinal micro-biota of guinea pigs, and none of these use a metagenomic sequencing approach [15,16]. As recent research indicate