Figure 1.

(a,b) Relative abundance of fecal microbiota at the phylum and genus level. (c) The alpha diversity of the fecal microbiome between the 4-month-old and 16-month-old groups. The richness of fecal microbiota was analyzed by the observed amplicon sequence variants (ASVs). Evenness was evaluated by the Shannon index. There were no significant differences in observed ASVs or Shannon value between growth stages (Kruskal–Wallis, observed-ASVs p-value = 0.42 and Shannon = 0.2). (d) Principal Coordination Analysis (PCoA) based on Bray–Curtis dissimilarity distance matrix. Beta diversity in the 4-month-olds (blue) and 16-month-olds (red) is grouped by bacterial compositional dissimilarities.