Fig. 2: Diet interplays with stress in remodeling the gut microbiota.

a PCoA plot of bacterial Operational Taxonomic Unit (OTU) in fecal samples of mice fed with chow diet (CD) or purified diet (PD) at the end of 14-day restraint stress (RS). The community distance is based on Bray–Curtis dissimilarity metrics of relative abundance determined by 16s rRNA sequencing. Each symbol represents the data of an individual mouse (n = 7). b, c Linear discriminative analysis (LDA) score of differentially expressed bacteria obtained from LEfSe analysis of fecal microbiota in mice fed with CD diet (b) or PD (c). A genus with Kruskal–Wallis ≤ 0.05, as well as LDA > 3.6 (b) or 3 (c) are shown. d The top 15 distinct bacterial genera identified by applying Random Forest Regression analysis of their relative abundances in control and stressed mice. e The relative abundance of Lactobacillus, Aggregatibacter, Alistipes, and Prevotella in the fecal microbiota of mice. Data are presented as mean ± SEM for n = 7. **p < 0.01 and ***p < 0.001 by Wilcoxon rank-sum test. ns no significance.