Table 3.

Sample information, microbial diversity, and sequence abundance in the cecal digesta of broilers.

Item	C1	CL2	LL3	HL4	SEM	P value	P value5
							Linear	Quadratic
Number of OTU6	5,129.7	5,111.3	6,045.7	5,168.0	206.34	0.271	0.845	0.147
Chao1	823.0	692.0	664.0	621.7	33.16	0.427	0.429	0.957
Fisher alpha	139.2	113.6	105.5	96.1	1.24	0.392	0.361	0.896
Shannon	6.5a	6.4a	6.0b	5.8b	0.09	0.003	0.005	0.896
Enspie	31.3a	28.0a,b	25.5b	20.8c	6.99	0.002	0.003	0.989

^a–cMeans within a row lacking a common superscript differ (P < 0.05).

¹C, control broilers without lipopolysaccharide challenge.

²CL, lipopolysaccharide-challenged broilers.

³LL, 1 g/kg of B. subtilis–fermented product–treated and lipopolysaccharide-challenged broilers.

⁴HL, 3 g/kg of B. subtilis–fermented product–treated and lipopolysaccharide-challenged broilers.

⁵Data were analyzed using the results of the CL, LL, and HL group.

⁶Number of operational taxonomic units (OTU), Chao1 (to estimate diversity from abundance data) and Fisher alpha (the relationship between the number of species and the number of individuals in those species) are species richness estimator; Shannon (to characterizes species diversity and which accounts for abundance and evenness of the species) and Enspie (effective number of species, probability of the interspecific encounter) are species evenness estimator.