| Summary: | Background: This study investigated the effects of fish oil and olive oil in improving dysbiosis and depressive-like symptoms. Methods and results: Male rats were fed normal, fish oil-rich or olive oil-rich diets for 14 weeks. Chronic mild stress (CMS) was administered from week 2. The sucrose preference test (SPT) and forced swimming test (FST) were used to determine depressive-like behavior. The SPT results revealed that the CMS, CMS with imipramine (CMS+P) treatment, and CMS with olive oil diet (CMS+O) groups exhibited significantly reduced sucrose intake from week 8, whereas the fish oil diet (CMS+F) group exhibited significantly reduced sucrose intake from week 10. The FST results showed that the immobile time of the CMS+F group was significantly less than that of the CMS-only group. Next generation sequencing (NGS) results showed CMS significantly reduced the abundance of <i>Lactobacillus</i> and increased that of <i>Marvinbryantia</i> and <i>Ruminiclostridium_6</i>. However, the CMS+F group showed an increase in the abundance of <i>Eisenbergiella</i>, <i>Ruminococcaceae_UCG_009</i>, and <i>Holdemania</i>, whereas the CMS+O group showed an increase in the abundance of <i>Akkermansia</i>. Conclusions: CMS stimuli altered the gut microbiome in depressed rats. Fish oil and olive oil exerted part of a prebiotic-like effect to ameliorate dysbiosis induced by CMS. However, only fish oil ameliorated depressive-like symptoms.
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