Total bacterial DNA was extracted from fecal samples using the DNA extraction kit (TIANGEN, China). For analysis of the taxonomic composition of gut microbiota, the hypervariable regions V3-V4 region of 16S rRNA genes was pooled and sequenced at the Illumina MiSeq 2500 platform (Illumina MiSeq, USA). Reads were trimmed and classified using QIIME (V 1.8.0).46 (link) After quality filtering and chimera removal, these sequences were assigned to operational taxonomic units (OTUs) with ≥ 97% similarity using UPARSE47 (link) and RDP classifier48 (link) was used to classify OTUs at a given taxonomic rank. The gut microbial signature was identified using selbal,49 (link) a greedy stepwise algorithm for balance selection, and unsupervised RandomForest classification analysis.
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