Traditional Chinese Medicine Prescriptions Decrease Diarrhea Rate by Relieving Colonic Inflammation and Ameliorating Caecum Microbiota in Piglets

Figure 5

α-Diversity and β-diversity analysis on the caecum microbiota. (a) Rarefaction curves; red, blue, and orange indicate the 6 samples of control, TCM1, and TCM2 groups, respectively. (b) Venn diagram; each circle represents a set of samples; the group between the circle and circle overlapping part digital represents of the common OTUs, and there is no overlapping part representing unique OTUs in each group. (c) Alpha diversity indices comparison; the ACE and Chao1 indexes represent the community richness of the microbiota, and the Shannon and Simpson indexes represent the community diversity of the microbiota. Results are expressed as mean ± SD, one-way ANOVA, n = 6. vs. the control; vs. the control. (d) UniFrac distance-based nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS); red circle, the control group; blue triangle, the TCM1 group; green square, the TCM2 group. The points of different colors belong to different samples (groups). Each point represents one sample. The closer the distance between two points, the higher the similarity, and the smaller the difference in the microbial community structure between the two samples. (e) Partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA); each point represents a sample, points of the same color belong to the same group, and points of the same group are marked with ellipses. If the samples belonging to the same grouping are closer to each other and the distance between the points of different grouping is farther, the classification model is better.

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)