Figure 2.

The effect of early probiotic use on the microbial diversity in the preterm gut. Inverse Simpson (a) and Shannon diversity index (b) of the gut microbial community, the effect size of gut microbiota-associated covariates determined in the weighted (c) and unweighted (d) UniFrac dissimilarity metrics, Db-RDA biplot showing microbial variance explained by probiotic use and DOL period (e), with adjusted R² on the right panel. *, ** and *** represent adjusted p < .05, 0.01, 0.005 between different DOL periods, and its color indicates respective comparisons within PRO and NoP. ^ and ^^ represent adjusted p < .05, 0.01 between PRO and NoP in the same DOL period. PRO, probiotics cohort; NoP, non-probiotics cohort; DOL, days of life