Fig. 3

Strain-level analysis of variation in gut microbial composition and functional profiles of QIN giant pandas between leaf and shoot eating seasons. A The variation in composition and abundance in the gut microbiota of giant pandas (n = 57) at the genus and species levels. Significantly differentially abundant taxa between seasons are indicated by asterisks. The size of the circle indicates the abundances and colors indicate the abundances of taxa that significantly differed between leaf- (green) and shoot-eating (orange) seasons. B The 15 most differentially abundant KEGG pathways and quantitative contributions to functional profiles that belonged to Clostridium (orange), Escherichia (blue), and other taxa (grey). The size of the circle indicates KEGG pathway relative abundances and the area of the sector indicates the relative contributions of each taxon. The color outlines indicate that the KEGG pathways significantly differed between the leaf- (green) and shoot-eating (orange) seasons. C Reconstruction of acyl chain-associated pathways that were differentially enriched between samples from different seasons. Histogram colors indicate genes that significantly differed in communities collected between leaf- (gray) and shoot-eating (black) seasons. FDR-corrected Wilcoxon rank sum tests were used to determine significance. **p < 0.01, *p < 0.05