Table 1.
Body weight, dietary composition, and chemical analysis of diets in Japanese Black beef cattle during the Early, Middle, and Late fattening stages.
Fig 1.
Diurnal changes in the 10-minute mean ruminal pH in Japanese Black beef cattle.
Days 1–7 correspond to observations made during the final 7 days of each fattening stage. Arrows indicate the sample collection time (1300 h).
Table 2.
The 24-h mean ruminal pH, duration of time, and area under curve (for pH <5.6 and 5.8) in Japanese Black beef cattle during the Early, Middle, and Late fattening stages.
Table 3.
Total VFA, individual VFA proportions, acetic acid to propionic acid (A/P) ratio, lactic acid concentrations, and LPS activity in Japanese Black beef cattle during the Early, Middle, and Late fattening stages.
Table 4.
Peripheral blood metabolite analysis in Japanese Black beef cattle during the Early, Middle, and Late fattening stages.
Fig 2.
Principal component analysis (PCA) plots for Japanese Black beef cattle.
PCA plots were generated for ruminal pH parameters (A), rumen fermentation parameters (B), and peripheral blood metabolites (C). PC1 and PC2 represent principal components 1 and 2, respectively.
Fig 3.
Column scatter plots of bacterial richness and diversity indices.
The Mothur program (version 1.41.1; University of Michigan; http://www.mothur.org/wiki/; Schloss et al., 2009) was used to analyze the bacterial richness (operational taxonomic unit; OTU, Chao1, and abundance-based coverage estimator; ACE) and diversity (Shannon, Simpson, and Heip) indices. *significant difference at P < 0.05.
Fig 4.
Non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) plots for Japanese Black beef cattle.
NMDS plots were generated for the bacterial OTUs (A) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway categories (B). The stress of NMDS analysis was 0.10 and 0.14 for the OTU- and KEGG pathway-based ordinations, respectively.
Table 5.
Relative abundances and taxonomic classification of core operational taxonomic units (OTU; shared by all samples) in Japanese Black beef cattle during the Early, Middle, and Late fattening stages.
Fig 5.
Correlation analyses between the core OTUs (shared by all samples) and rumen parameters.
Cells are colored based on Pearson correlation analyses. Blue represents a negative correlation and red represents a positive correlation. *significant correlation between OTUs and rumen parameters at P < 0.05. Mean = 24-h mean ruminal pH; Minimum = 24-h minimum ruminal pH; Maximum = 24-h maximum ruminal pH; Time pH < 5.6 = duration of time where pH < 5.6; Time pH < 5.8 = duration of time where pH < 5.8; LPS = lipopolysaccharide; LBP = lipopolysaccharide-binding protein.