Fig. 4.
Microbiota status versus host inflammatory status. a Microbiota status at T68 (PCoA1 coordinate from Fig. 2a), plotted against host inflammatory status at T75 (histological score of the distal colon (Additional Tables 4 and 5); higher scores indicate higher levels of inflammation). Histological scores are integers; jitter has been added to improve visibility of individual data-points. Each dot represents one rat (n = 58). Colors represent treatment groups as indicated. The side-panel shows the frequency distribution and density curve of alternative microbiota states from Fig. 2c (top left: all groups). The top-panel shows the frequency distribution of alternative host states from Additional Fig. 8a, to which a density curve was added according to the results of finite Gaussian mixture modeling using Mclust 5.4 [18]. b Relative frequencies of alternative microbiota states as a function of host inflammatory status (distal colon histology score). Relative frequencies are calculated from the data in panel a. When separately analyzing the limited numbers of observations in subgroups (same histology score H), bimodal (mixed normal) distributions could be confirmed for subsets H = 2 (p =0.04) and H = 6 (p = 0.05) (finite Gaussian mixture modeling using Mclust 5.4 [18] with bootstrap sequential Likelihood Ratio Testing (LRT)). *, one observation only; each of the other categories represents from 3 to 13 observations. For host status 0 to 8, microbiota state distribution strongly correlates with host status (linear regression, r2 = 0.63, p = 0.01 (F-test)). c Relative frequencies of alternative host states as a function of microbiota status. Relative frequencies are calculated from the data in a. Microbiota status is expressed as PCoA1 coordinate (Fig. 2a) with binning in intervals of 0.02; the central value of each bin is indicated. *, one observation only; each of the other categories represents from 3 to 13 observations. For microbiota status categories − 0.09 to 0.03, host state distribution strongly correlates with microbiota status (linear regression, r2 = 0.91, p = 0.0009 (F-test))