Fecal Microbiome Does Not Represent Whole Gut Microbiome

Figure 5

The location-specific chemical diversity in the GI tracts. (a) Heatmap of the chemicals in each location of the GI tracts based on the Bray-Curtis distance matrix. (b) β-Diversity centroid of LC-MS/MS samples from each GI sites. . (c) Similarity of chemical compounds from GI sites based on PCoA, , . (d) Nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) plot of the chemicals showing location-specific variation. The relative quantities and identities of chemicals detected by ultra-high-resolution LC-MS/MS in each location of the GI tracts were used for the statistical analyses. The sampling locations within the GI tract were determined based on the anatomical feature: the stomach, the duodenum (small intestine_1), the jejunum (small intestine_2 ~ small intestine_5), the ileum (small intestine_6), the cecum (large intestine_1), the colon (large intestine_2 ~ large intestine_6), and the rectum (large intestine_7). The anatomical differences between each location are shown in Figure S1.

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