Fig. 4.

The interaction of H. pylori infection and HFD induces the alteration of gut microbiota which is associated with IR. Microbiota composition was analyzed in faeces of H. pylori-infected and non-infected mice fed either chow or HFD (n = 5 for each group). (A) Plots shown were generated using the weighted version of the UniFrac-based Principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) after 12 weeks. Samples from H. pylori-infected mice fed HFD included in the red circle clustered distinctly from those of HFD-fed controls embraced in the blue circle. (B) Bacterial taxonomic profiling at the phylum level of gut bacteria from different groups after 12 weeks. (C) Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) coupled with effect size measurements identifies the most differentially abundant taxa between HFD-fed mice with H. pylori infection and HFD controls after 12 weeks. HFD controls-enriched taxa are indicated with a negative LDA score (red), and taxa enriched in H. pylori-infected HFD group have a positive score (green). Only taxa meeting an LDA significant threshold of > 2 are shown. (D) The jejunum tissues of mice were analyzed for the expression of intestinal tight junction proteins including ZO-1, occludin and claudin-1 after 12 weeks. The PCoA (E) and unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA) (F) analysis showed the alterations of microbial community after 24 weeks. Samples from the HFD group regardless of H. pylori infection status clustered together in the red circle which are different from those given chow diet in the blue circle.