Table 1.
The composition and nutritional ingredients of the experimental diet (dry matter basis).
Table 2.
Comparison of blood parameters between the HP and LP groups.
Table 3.
Comparison of rumen fermentation parameters between the HP and LP groups.
Table 4.
Comparison of apparent digestibility of nutrients between the HP and LP groups (%).
Fig 1.
A: Venn diagram representation of the shared and exclusive OTUs. B: Rarefaction curves of each group. The rarefaction analysis was conducted at 97% sequence identity, and each curve represented one individual gastrointestinal sample of goats (n = 8). HP.R: rumen of HP; LP.R: rumen of LP; HP.A: abomasum of HP; LP.A: abomasum of LP; HP.J: jejunum of HP; LP.J: jejunum of LP; HP.Co: colon of HP; LP.Co: colon of LP; HP.Ce: cecum of HP; LP.Ce: cecum of LP.
Fig 2.
A: Comparison of alpha diversity indices between the HP and LP groups. Error bars represent the SD of two samples. Asterisks show significant differences between groups (*P<0.05), the same as below. B: Principal coordinate analysis of bacterial samples from the gastrointestinal tract. A greater distance between two samples indicated a lower similarity. The percentage of variation explained by PC1 and PC2 are indicated on the axis. C: A microbial analysis of similarities (ANOSIM). R was the mean rank of between-group dissimilarities, ranging from -1 to 1. When the R value is greater than 0, the difference between groups is greater than that within groups, indicating that there are differences between groups; when the P value is less than 0.05, it indicates significant differences between groups. HP.R: rumen of HP; LP.R: rumen of LP; HP.A: abomasum of HP; LP.A: abomasum of LP; HP.J: jejunum of HP; LP.J: jejunum of LP; HP.Co: colon of HP; LP.Co: colon of LP; HP.Ce: cecum of HP; LP.Ce: cecum of LP.
Fig 3.
A: Bacterial compositions across the gastrointestinal tract at the phylum level (only the top 10 abundant phyla are presented). HP.R: rumen of HP; LP.R: rumen of LP; HP.A: abomasum of HP; LP.A: abomasum of LP; HP.J: jejunum of HP; LP.J: jejunum of LP; HP.Co: colon of HP; LP.Co: colon of LP; HP.Ce: cecum of HP; LP.Ce: cecum of LP. B: Heatmap of the core genera across the gastrointestinal tract (the relative abundance of microbes was log-transformed, and only the top 20 abundant genera are presented). The closer to the color blue, the higher the relative abundance, while the closer to the color green, the lower the relative abundance.
Table 5.
The bacterial phyla and genera whose relative abundances were significantly different between HP and LP across the GIT.
Fig 4.
Correlation analysis between the bacteria across the gastrointestinal tract and the true digestibility of phosphorus in goats.
Correlations are indicated by large circles and weaker correlations by small circles. The scale colors denote whether the correlation is positive (closer to 1, red circles) or negative (closer to −1, blue circles) between the taxa and gastrointestinal tract variables.