Fig. 3

Comparison of microbiome structure between the responder and non-responder groups after treatment. (A) Principal-coordinate analysis of gut microbiota based on the Bray-Curtis, unweighted UniFrac, and weighted UniFrac distance. Significant P-values of PERMANOVA between groups emphasize the differences in microbial community structure. Grey and blue circles represent non-responders and responders, respectively. Box plots represent the median, lower and upper quartiles of the Bray-Curtis, unweighted UniFrac, and weighted UniFrac distances at each group comparing the effect of responsiveness of treatment on the community structure. Whiskers were calculated using the Tukey method. A lower distance indicates greater similarity compared to responders’ microbial communities. (B) Bar plots represent the relative abundances of phyla in responder (n = 4) and non-responder group (n = 6). Violin plots reporting the relative abundances of differentially abundant bacterial phyla between responder and non-responder group. Data are presented mean ± standard deviation. *p < 0.05 and **p < 0.01 (Mann-Whitney U test). (C) Violin plots reporting the relative abundances of differentially abundant bacterial genera between responders and non-responder group. Data are presented mean ± standard deviation. *p < 0.05 and **p < 0.01 (Mann-Whitney U test). (D) The heat map shows hierarchical clustering (Unweighted Pair Group Method with Arithmetic Mean, UPGMA method) of Spearman correlation coefficients between relative abundances of bacterial genera and metabolites in non-responders and responders samples using Euclidean distance. Positive and negative correlations are indicated by red and green colors, respectively, as shown in the color key. Missing values are indicated by grey spots