Table 1.
Characteristics and environmental factors for the healthy cats enrolled in the study.
Table 2.
Characteristics and pretreatment of cats with nasal neoplasia enrolled in the study.
Table 3.
Characteristics and infection status of cats with FURTD enrolled in the study.
Fig 1.
Principal coordinate analysis for indoor/outdoor status of healthy cats.
Principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) plots based on the unweighted UniFrac distance metric illustrating differences in microbial communities present in the nose of healthy cats living indoor versus outdoor. Every dot represents the bacterial community of one individual cat. A separation defined as clustering was observed in indoor and outdoor cats. PC1: first component along the x- and y-axes, PC2: second component, PC3: third component; blue dots: outdoor cats; red dots: indoor cats.
Fig 2.
Principal coordinate analysis for antibiotic treatment of cats with nasal neoplasia.
Principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) plots based on the unweighted UniFrac distance metric illustrating differences in microbial communities present in the nose of cats with nasal neoplasia. Every dot represents the bacterial community of one individual cat. A separation defined as clustering was not observed. PC1: first component along the x- and y-axes, PC2: second component, PC3: third component; blue dots: antibiotic treatment; red dots: no antibiotic treatment.
Fig 3.
Principal coordinate analysis for Chlamydia felis infection in cats with FURTD.
Principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) plots based on the unweighted UniFrac distance metric illustrating differences in microbial communities present in the nose of cats with FURTD. Every dot represents the bacterial community of one individual cat. A separation defined as clustering was observed in cats according to their status of being positive or negative for Chlamydia felis. PC1: first component along the x- and y-axes, PC2: second component, PC3: third component; blue dots: cats that tested positive for Chlamydia felis; red dots: cats that tested negative for Chlamydia felis.
Fig 4.
Principal coordinate analysis for FHV-1 infection in cats with FURTD.
Principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) plots based on the unweighted UniFrac distance metric illustrating differences in microbial communities present in the nose of healthy cats that tested positive or negative for FHV-1. Every dot represents the bacterial community of one individual cat. A separation defined as clustering was observed. PC1: first component along the x- and y-axes, PC2: second component, PC3: third component; blue dots: cats that tested positive for FHV-1; red dots: cats that tested negative for FHV-1.
Fig 5.
Rarefaction curves of 16S rRNA gene sequences from healthy cats of different age groups.
Lines represent the mean of each age group, and error bars represent the standard deviations. The analysis was performed on a randomly selected subset of 25,640 sequences per sample. (A) Observed Species. (B) Chao1 index. (C) Shannon diversity index (age group 2: red line, age group 3: blue line, age group 4: orange line, age group 5: green line).
Fig 6.
Rarefaction curves of 16S rRNA gene sequences obtained from healthy cats living in different environments.
Lines represent the mean of each group, and error bars represent the standard deviations. (A) Observed Species. (B) Chao1 index. (C) Shannon diversity index (cats living indoor: red line, cats living indoor with access to a balcony: blue line, cats with access to the outside: yellow line, cats living in a shelter: green line).
Fig 7.
Composition of the nasal microbiome in healthy and diseased cats.
Bacterial phyla in the nose of single cats enrolled in the study. Each bar chart represents one cat.
Fig 8.
Bacterial phyla and families in the nose of cats.
The average of the most common bacterial phyla and families identified in healthy cats according to their age group or environment and in cats with FURTD and nasal neoplasia. Healthy cats: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H.
Table 4.
Relative proportions of the most abundant bacterial taxa identified by sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene.
Table 5.
Taxa present at >1% mean relative abundance in one or more groups of cats enrolled in the study.
Fig 9.
Differentially abundant bacterial groups shown by LDA scores based on LEfSe.
Groups that were differentially abundant between cats with nasal neoplasia that received (red bars) or did not receive (green bars) antibiotic treatment before sampling. Taxonomic levels are represented as p_ (phylum), c_ (class, o_ (order), f_ (family), and g_ (genus).