Figure 1.

Differences of gut microbiota pattern between Apoe^−/− mice with or without atherosclerosis. The V3–V4 region of the bacterial 16S rRNA was sequenced in fecal samples from 12 non-atherosclerotic (CK) mice and 12 atherosclerotic (AS) mice. Then, comparisons were carried out using alpha and beta diversity. (A) The schematic illustration of the comparison of gut microbiota between CK and AS group. (B) The Shannon–Wiener index at the family and genus level. (C) The Simpson index at the family and genus level. (D) The Pielou index at the family and genus level. (E) Gram-positive (GP) to Gram-negative (GN) strain ratio. (F) Distribution of each cluster in healthy mice and atherosclerotic mice. The χ² test was used to compare the 2 groups. (G) Principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) of gut microbiota based on Weighted Unifrac distance. (H) Non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) of gut microbiota based on Bray–Curtis similarities. They illustrated the difference in the microbial composition among the samples. (I) Heat map with M-LDA score in the level of genus. The heat map indicates the relative percentage of each genus for the different groups. The M-LDA score means the importance of each genus that distinguished the CK and AS groups. Data are shown as mean ± SD (fecal samples n = 12 per group). Unpaired t test (two-tailed) was performed (B–E), P < 0.05 (∗), P < 0.001 (∗∗∗).