Fig. 3

Colonic gut microbiota alterations. Absolute abundances of (a) Firmicutes, (b) Bacteroidetes and the ratio of Firmicutes over Bacteroidetes (c); relative abundances of 18 bacteria at genus level with raw counts of at least 100 (d); Venn diagram summarizing number of OTUs shared between different groups (e); alpha diversity indexes including number of observed species (f) and Chao1 index (g); beta diversity indicated by PCoA plot of unweighted UniFrac distance showing sample clustering by treatment groups (h). Significant difference of ND from the HF group was denoted by # P < 0.05, ## P < 0.01; significant difference of the treatment groups from HF group was donated by *P < 0.05. ApoE−/− mice were fed on either normal chow diet (ND) or high fat (HF) diet with or without LGG (1x108CFU/day) or TLM (5 mg/kg/day)