Fig. 2

Diversity analysis of microorganism in the oatmeal and control group during study period. (a) Clustering analysis of gut microbiota. UPGMA was used based on Bray–Curtis dissimilarity distance of 448 OTUs. (b) Ace index. (c) Shannon index. Boxes showed the medians and the interquartile ranges (IQRs), the whiskers denoted the lowest and highest values that were within 1.5 times the IQR from the first and third quartiles, and outliers were shown as individual black dots. Wilcoxon signed-rank test (two-tailed) was used for within-group comparisons; whereas, Mann–Whitney U test (two-tailed) was used for between-group comparisons. * indicated a P value under 0.05. Whereas, the P value in the right upper corner was from Mann–Whitney U test (two-tailed) evaluating the difference of the index alteration throughout the study between two groups. (d) PCoA for the oatmeal and control group at baseline and endpoint based on Bray–Curtis dissimilarity distance of 448 OTUs. PC1, principal coordinate 1; PC2, principal coordinate 2. (e) Bray–Curtis dissimilarity distance (on the basis of 448 OTUs) between baseline and endpoint in the oatmeal and control group. Mann–Whitney U test was used for statistical analyzing. (f) The microbiota composition at phylum level in both groups. Oat Day 0: baseline in oatmeal group; Oat Day 45: endpoint in oatmeal group; Con Day 0: baseline in control group; Con Day 45: endpoint in control group