Figure 5

Diversity within the faecal microbiota of the active and placebo groups over the duration of the study. (a) Box-and-whisker plot showing the Chao1 and Shannon diversity (alpha-diversity) and (b) a non-metric dimensional scaling (NMDS) plot showing the weighted unifrac (beta-diversity) of the active group and placebo group at baseline and 6 months were generated and differences were assessed with PERMANOVA; statistical outliers are represented as black dots and no significant changes were observed. Ellipses represent the 95% confidence interval. The data represents 80 samples at baseline (43 active and 37 placebo) and 64 samples at 6 months (35 active and 29 placebo) from which a total of 3,522,472 reads (mean reads per sample = 24,461 ± 7,399) were retained after quality filtering and 7,075 unique OTUs were identified and quantified (0.1 non-zero values fraction). 11,001 reads per sample were obtained after rarefaction to the smallest library size. Filtering of the low-abundant OTUs retained 2,047 OTUs that were grouped into 11 phyla and 205 genera.