Fig. 1

Changes in the gut microbial composition in response to ND-statins. a Principal coordinates analysis projection plot showing ordination of the samples using the Bray-Curtis dissimilarity matrices. Dots correspond to one individual within each control (vehicle, green) and statin (pravastatin, blue; atorvastatin, red) cohorts combined with normal diet. Lines connect each sample to the centroid of the corresponding treatment. Ellipses limits represent 95% confidence for the group centroid. b Biological diversity was quantified by the Shannon and Simpson indices of diversity as implemented in the R package vegan [67]. The higher the Shannon and Simpson indices, the greater the diversity. Pielou evenness (J) was calculated as J = H′ / log(S), where H′ is the Shannon index and log(S) is the natural logarithm of the number of OTUs. The lower the Pielou index, the less even the community. Each black point represents one individual, and the coloured dots and brackets show the mean and standard deviation (SD), respectively. The effect of the treatment was evaluated by one-way ANOVA followed by Dunnett’s post hoc test. *P ≤ 0.05; **P ≤ 0.01. c, d Distinctive gut microbiota composition associated with statin consumption revealed by linear discriminant analysis (LDA). Graphs represent the LDA scores of the differentially abundant OTUs associated with the pravastatin (c) or atorvastatin (d) treatment. Taxa enriched in the gut of mice treated with statins are represented with negative LDA scores. Positive LDA scores represent OTUs enriched in the control cohort (vehicle). Heatmaps on the right show the averaged relative abundance (log₁₀ transformed) of the discriminative OTUs for the indicated treatments