Fig. 4.
Dynamics of PAT-perturbed microbiota after transfer and effects on host immune phenotypes. a Study design: donor mice received non-acidified water alone (controls) or drinking water with tylosin (PAT) from P5 to P10 and were sacrificed at P12, then cecal contents were harvested and pooled. Germ-free (GF) C57BL/6 mice at P35 were gavaged with cecal contents from the P12 control or PAT-exposed donors (n = 7 per group). b Fecal secretory IgA from day 0 to 76 post-gavage in the now-conventionalized mice that had received control or PAT cecal contents. A random effects repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to test for differences in IgA values between the PAT and the control recipients, taking into account the correlated structure of the measurements within subjects, (F1,10 = 43.36, p > 0.0001). c Frequency of splenic TCRβ+ lymphocytes at sacrifice, 77 days post-gavage, (mean (±SD)). Statistical analysis was performed using the Mann–Whitney U non-parametric test; *p < 0.05. d Relative abundance of taxa in inoculum (in), fecal, cecal (ce) and colon (co) samples over the course of the experiment. e Median (±IQR) unrarified microbiota α-diversity over the course of the experiment in recipients of the control or PAT-perturbed inoculum, in fecal samples, or ileal (il), cecal (ce) and colonic (co) contents at sacrifice. f Unweighted Unifrac analysis of inoculum and fecal specimens from groups conventionalized with control (blue) or PAT-perturbed (red) microbiota, visualized in principal coordinate analysis (PCoA); the three components explain 43% of the total variance for each panel. Statistical analysis of intergroup UniFrac distances performed by Adonis test, with p-values shown