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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2020 Jun 18.
Published in final edited form as: Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol. 2018 Dec 12;40(2):171–177. doi: 10.1017/ice.2018.319

Figure 2: Principal coordinates analysis (PCoA) of bacterial communities on ICU stethoscopes.

Figure 2:

Bacterial communities were analyzed using unweighted (A) and weighted (B) UniFrac and visualized by PCoA. UniFrac compares communities based on the phylogenetic relatedness of their constituent bacteria; unweighted considers presence/absence of bacteria while the weighted approach also considers their abundance within each community. The PCoA provides a means of visualizing these relationships, and each symbol on the PCoA plot represents an individual bacterial community derived from one stethoscope or background control sample. All community types (practitioner stethoscopes, patient room stethoscopes, clean stethoscopes and background controls) were significantly different by unweighted UniFrac (p<0.05; PERMANOVA). By weighted UniFrac the two in-use stethoscope types (practitioner and patient room) did not differ from each other, nor did the two background samples (clean stethoscopes and background controls), but the two in-use stethoscopes were significantly different the two types of background samples (p<0.05; PERMANOVA).