Fig. 5

Assessment of gut microbiota diversity in FCG mice. 16s rRNA gene sequencing and metagenomic analyses were performed to assess microbiota diversity in FCG mice. The number of different OTUs as a function of the number of sequence reads (A) and Shannon Diversity Indexes (B) were determined for gonadally intact and gonadectomized (Gdx) animals. Representative PCoA plots of Bray–Curtis pair-wise comparison distances demonstrate clustering differences between males and females in both intact (C) and gonadectomized (D) animals. For each distinct OTU identified, percent abundancies were calculated for intact animals (E, Additional file 9: Table S12). The total height of y-axis represents 100% of the assigned sequences after quality filtering, and the size of the colored regions represents proportional contributions of each phylotype shown with the top 11 families being visualized. Abundances greater than 5% are labeled with percentages. Data in A and B are represented as the mean ± SEM with each point representing one mouse. Statistics by Kruskal–Wallis test for A and B, followed by Dunn’s multiple comparisons tests provided in Additional file 9: Table S10. Bray–Curtis comparisons between each group are provided in Additional file 9: Table S11. A full list of taxon abundancies in E are provided in Additional file 9: Table S12. Gdx = gonadectomized; OTUs = observable taxonomic units