Effective bacteriotherapy re-establishes a healthy, diverse microbiota profile in epidemic <i>C. difficile</i> 027/BI supershedder mice.

<p><b>a</b>) Principal component analysis of the 16S rRNA gene sequences demonstrates that distinct microbiota profiles (circled) are associated with “healthy/naïve” mice, mice undergoing “clindamycin treatment” and “persisting supershedders” of <i>C. difficile</i> 027/BI-7. PC1 and PC2 account for 38% of the variation. Each symbol represents one microbiota (dot) or treatment (star) community. Treatment of supershedder mice with feces from healthy mice, the cultured fecal derivative or mixtures of defined, cultured bacteria are as indicated: brown - shading for healthy feces, blue - shading for fecal derivatives culture passaged once, green - shading for mixture of six suppressive bacteria (MixB) and grey - shading for <i>Bacteroides/Lactobacillus</i> mixture. The symbol representing the <i>Bacteroides/Lactobacillus</i> treatment is based on culturing counts and modified to reflect the relative abundance of each organism in the mixture. Next to the shading: pre = pre-treatment; 3 = 3 days post-treatment; 4 = 4 days post-treatment; 6 = 6 days post-treatment; 14 = 14 days post-treatment. Grey background arrows indicate the shifts in the microbiota profiles of treated mice over a 14-day period. <b>b</b>) Fecal shedding profiles from supershedder mice (n = 5/group) that were treated with MixA, MixB or MixC (<a href="http://www.plospathogens.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.ppat.1002995#ppat.1002995.s011" target="_blank">Table S3</a>). c) Shannon Diversity Indices of the intestinal microbiota of supershedders pre- and post-treatment (day 3, 6 and 14) with MixB and that of the corresponding input community.