Table 1.
Clinical characteristics of preterm infants according to adequacy of weight for gestational age at birth and discharge.
Fig 1.
Alpha diversity measurements of meconium microbial communities from preterm infants comparing weight adequacy at birth and at discharge.
The left panel presents the number of observed Operational Taxonomic Unities (OTUs) (p-value = 0.745). The right panel presents the Shannon microbial index of diversity (p-value = 0.127). Boxes span the first to third quartiles; the horizontal line inside the boxes represents the median. Whiskers extending vertically from the boxes indicate variability outside the upper and lower quartiles, and single circles indicate outliers. AGA: adequate for gestational age; SGA: small for gestational age. (The group SGA-LGA was excluded from data analysis, because of its limited size).
Fig 2.
Relative phyla abundance of the gut microbiota according with weigh adequacy.
Each stacked bar represents the mean relative abundance of weight adequacy group at birth (A) and at moment of discharge (B).
Fig 3.
Differential abundance analysis according to weight adequacy.
Each dot represents an individual OTU, organized by their Genus. (A) Differential abundance analysis according to weight adequacy at birth: Polynucleobacter (p = 0.0163), Gp1 (p = 0.018) and Prevotella (p = 0.038) were more abundant in meconium of preterm born AGA. (B) Differential abundance analysis according to weight adequacy for gestational age at discharge: Escherichia fergusoni (p = 0.014) and Streptococcus dentisani (p = 0.43) were more abundant in meconium of preterm AGA at discharge; Prevotella copri (p = 0.002), Roseburia inulinivorans (p = 0.003), Staphylococcus sp. (p = 0,003), Staphylococcus capitis subsp. Capitis (p = 0.004), Sutterella stercoricanis (p = 0.014), Corynebacterium tuberculostearicum (p = 0.033) and Ruminococcaceae (0.043) were more abundant in meconium of preterm SGA at discharge.
Table 2.
Clinical characteristics, growth and type of milk received according to catch-up before or after 6 months of corrected age.
Fig 4.
Alpha diversity measurements of meconium microbial communities from preterm infants comparing head circumference (HC) catch up until or after 6 months of corrected age.
The left panel presents the number of observed Operational Taxonomic Unities (OTUs) (p-value = 0.225). The right panel presents the Shannon microbial index of diversity (p-value = 0.045). Boxes span the first to third quartiles; the horizontal line inside the boxes represents the median. Whiskers extending vertically from the boxes indicate variability outside the upper and lower quartiles, and single circles indicate outliers.
Table 3.
Nonparametric Multivariate Analysis of Variance of bacterial community structure used for controlling confounding variables.
Fig 5.
Differential abundance analysis according to head circumference catch up.
Each dot represents an individual OTU, organized by their Genus. (A) Differential abundance analysis according to early or late HC catch up. Data plotted as log2 fold change; OTUs to the right of the zero line were more abundant in HC catch up until 6 months corrected age group, and OTUs to the left of the zero line were more abundant in HC catch up after 6 months corrected age group. (B) Difference for microbial composition between infants with early HC catch up growth (up to 6 months) and late HC catch up growth (after 6 months); HC: head circumference.
Fig 6.
Microbial community functional prediction.
Gut microbiota functional predictoin, using PICRUSt, of infants with early or late HC catch up. The bar plot respresents function mean proportion, and error bars represents the difference between the two groups. Coloring of the error bar is according with the group with the higher proportion of the respective function. Blue color (A) represents infants with HC catch up until 6 months, and Orange (B) represents those with HC catch up after 6 months of age.