1. Cecal metabolome during C. difficile colonization and infection.
Cecal metabolome during C. difficile colonization and infection. (A) Variable-importance plot of the top 50 metabolites identified by Random Forest analysis. The mean accuracy value decrease is a measure of how much predictive power is lost if a given metabolite is removed or permuted in the Random Forest algorithm; thus, the more important a metabolite is to classifying samples into time point categories, the further to the right its point is on the graph. Metabolite points are color-coded according to the KEGG superpathway in which they belong. Metabolite names are labeled red if their level increased throughout infection, black if they were variable, and green if the level decreased. (B) Heat map showing the relative abundances of the metabolites identified in panel A. Each column corresponds to the cecal metabolome from an individual mouse, and each row corresponds to a given metabolite. Unsupervised hierarchical clustering was used to cluster metabolites with similar abundance profiles over time. The heat map scale ranges from −3 to 3 on a log2 scale.
Joshua R. Fletcher et al. mSphere 2018; doi: /mSphere