Electroacupuncture alleviates symptoms and identifies a potential microbial biomarker in patients with constipation-predominant irritable bowel syndrome

Figure 2 Diversity of gut microbiota and their composition in healthy controls, patients with irritable bowel syndrome with predominant constipation at baseline, after electroacupuncture and one-month follow-up. A: Alpha diversity is presented as boxplots; B: Beta diversities were presented by the principal coordinate analysis plot; C: Differential abundance calculated by Analysis of the Composition of Microbiomes with Bias Correction are presented as bar plots of beta coefficients and standard error of beta. Orange and blue colors represent positive and negative associations respectively, with the corresponding columns; D: Correlation between microbial genera change in irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) symptom including IBS-SSS and IBS-QoL. Only taxa with significant associations after being adjusted with the Bonferroni correction are presented. ACP: Irritable bowel syndrome patients after electroacupuncture; ACP1M: Irritable bowel syndrome patients after electroacupuncture and one-month follow-up; IBS: Irritable bowel syndrome patients; IBS-SSS: Irritable bowel syndrome symptom severity scale scores; IBS-QoL: Irritable bowel syndrome quality of life; PERMANOVA: Permutational multivariate analysis of variance.