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. 2020 Sep 25;3:534. doi: 10.1038/s42003-020-01259-8

Fig. 2. Antibiotics reduce key immune regulators in the adult gut microbiota.

Fig. 2

The gut microbiota of adult honey bees was analyzed before (Pre-OTC) and after (Post-OTC) hive administration with oxytetracycline. a, b Bar plots illustrating the relative and absolute abundance of bacterial species in the gut microbiota of adult honey bee samples as determined by V4 region 16S rRNA gene sequencing. Each bar represents a pooled sample of three adult guts collected from n = 6 hives, with two replicates performed for each hive. Absolute abundance of bacterial taxa was estimated by quantifying total 16S rRNA gene copy number via qPCR. c Strip chart showing differentially abundant taxa in the gut microbiota of OTC-exposed adult honey bees. Positive values indicate an increased relative abundance in response to OTC and negative values indicate a decreased relative abundance. Statistical inference was performed on centered log-ratio transformed read counts of sequence variants using ALDEx2 software in R. Features exceeding absolute effect size (>0.5) and P value (<0.05) thresholds are shown as red. d, e Alpha diversity (measured via Shannon’s H Index) and Beta diversity (measured via Aitchison’s distance between samples at different time points) of adult gut microbiota samples. Data represents the median (line in box), IQR (box), and minimum/maximum (whiskers) of respective microbiota diversity metrics with statistical comparisons shown for separate Wilcoxon tests. f Abundance of seven tetracycline-resistance loci in adult gut samples relative to the total number of 16S rRNA gene copies present. **P < 0.01 and ****P < 0.0001.