Gut Microbiota and Metabolite Analysis

Student’s t-test, nonparametric Mann-Whitney, or Pearson correlation analysis was used when appropriate. Here, four parameters (ace, chao, shannon and simpson) were calculated to evaluate the alpha diversity of gut microbiota. The principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) was used to assess the beta diversity of gut microbiota. The linear discriminant-analysis (LDA) effect size (LEfSe) was conducted to identify the differential gut microbiota between the two groups, and the phylogenetic investigation of communities by reconstruction of unobserved states (PICRUSt) analysis based on Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) database was performed to predict the potential functions of the differential gut microbiota. To identify the differential microbial metabolites (variable importance in projection (VIP) > 1.0 and p-value<0.05) between the two groups, the orthogonal partial least squares (OPLS) model was built using microbial metabolites. All the analyses was carried out using SPSS 19.0, R software 4.0 and Cytoscape 5.0, and p<0.05 was considered to be statistically significant.