About the Authors

Blake C. Guard

Contributed equally to this work with: Blake C. Guard, Hanna Mila

Affiliation Gastrointestinal Laboratory, Department of Small Animal Clinical Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, United States of America

Hanna Mila

Contributed equally to this work with: Blake C. Guard, Hanna Mila

Affiliation NeoCare, IHAP, Reproduction, Université de Toulouse, Toulouse, France

Jörg M. Steiner

Affiliation Gastrointestinal Laboratory, Department of Small Animal Clinical Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, United States of America

Claire Mariani

Affiliation Royal Canin, Aimargues, France

Jan S. Suchodolski

Affiliation Gastrointestinal Laboratory, Department of Small Animal Clinical Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, United States of America

Sylvie Chastant-Maillard

schastant@envt.fr

Affiliation NeoCare, IHAP, Reproduction, Université de Toulouse, Toulouse, France

Competing Interests

Sylvie Chastant-Maillard and Claire Mariani are both employees of Royal Canin. Jan Suchodolski is an editor of PLOS ONE. The authors have declared that no other competing interests exist. Furthermore, this does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization: SC CM HM. Data curation: BCG HM. Formal analysis: BCG JSS. Funding acquisition: SC CM HM. Investigation: BCG HM. Methodology: HM SC CM. Project administration: HM CM SC JSS. Resources: BCG HM JSS JMS CM SC. Software: BCG. Supervision: CM SC JSS JMS. Validation: BCG HM CM JSS SC JMS. Visualization: BCG HM. Writing – original draft: BCG. Writing – review & editing: BCG HM SC CM JSS.