Correlations between the Composition of the Bovine Microbiota and Vitamin B Abundance.

Vitamin B is synthesized by prokaryotes in the rumens of dairy cows-and this has implications in human nutrition since humans rely on consumption of dairy products for vitamin B acquisition. However, the concentration of vitamin B in milk is highly variable, and there is interest in determining what causes vitamin B variability. We collected 92 temporally linked rumen, fecal, blood, and milk sample sets from Holstein cows at various stages of lactation fitted with rumen cannula and attempted to define which bacterial genera correlated well with vitamin B abundance.