Figure 3

Comparison of richness and diversity estimations of urine from interstitial cystitis (IC) patients and healthy females (HF). A: Rarefaction curves depicting number of OTUs (at 3% genetic difference) as function of the total number of sequences for the combined sequence pool datasets for IC urine V1V2 and V6 (red and orange) and HF urine V1V2 and V6 (dark and light blue). The curves show a decreased estimate of species richness in the IC urine microbiome compared to the HF urine microbiome. B, C, and D: Box plots showing richness and diversity of 16S rDNA sequences. Boxes contain 50% of the data and have lines at the lower quartile (red), median and upper quartile (green) values. Ends of the whiskers mark the lowest and highest value. The plots show the results of a combined assessment of the eight urine samples in each HF and IC microbiome and with normalized numbers of sequences for OTU and Shannon index values (B and C). B: Observed OTU counts (at 3% genetic difference) of all urine samples taken from HF and IC, for both V1V2 and V6 datasets. C and D: Shannon index and inverse Simpson index at 3% sequence dissimilarity calculated to estimate diversity for both V1V2 and V6 datasets. Asterisks (*) indicate significant differences (Wilcox rank sum test: * p < 0.05). Note that a single sample (P2) in the IC community is the only outlier with the highest values for both richness and diversity (for both V1V2 and V6 analysis).