Fig. 2.

Impact of A. phagocytophilum infection on microbiome diversity. A Comparison of the alpha diversity by observed features (Kruskal-Wallis test, P = 0.31), Pielouʼs evenness index (Kruskal-Wallis test, P = 0.90) and Faithʼs index (Kruskal-Wallis test, P = 0.46). B Comparison of beta diversity for Ap-uninfected vs Ap-infected using the Bray-Curtis dissimilarity index (PERMANOVA, F = 32.84, P = 0.087, stress = 0.1507). Small circles and triangles in the principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) plot represent samples; ellipses indicate 95% confidence intervals. ANOVA test was performed and showed that the beta dispersion of the samples is not significantly different (P = 0.849). C Venn diagram showing the number of unique or shared taxa between Ap-uninfected and Ap-infected ticks. D Dendrogram heatmap resulting from the heatmap.2 functions implemented in R (R Core Team, 2023), and performed in RStudio IDE (RStudio Team, 2020). The taxa were clustered based on relative abundance (calculated as clr-transformed values). Each column represents the clr-values for bacterial taxa per sample and group. Lines represent bacterial taxa with significant changes between the two datasets. Color represents the clr-value.