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Fig. 4 | Animal Microbiome

Fig. 4

From: Survey of rumen microbiota of domestic grazing yak during different growth stages revealed novel maturation patterns of four key microbial groups and their dynamic interactions

Fig. 4

Bacterial and archaeal taxonomic biomarkers for defining rumen microbiota maturation in grazing yaks. a, d Heatmap of the mean relative abundance of the age-discriminatory taxa against time of sampling for each age group. b, e Age-discriminatory taxa were identified by applying random forest regression of the relative abundances of taxa in rumen fluid against chronological age of grazing yaks. Importance was determined based on the percentage increase in the mean-squared error of the predicted microbiota age when the relative abundance values of each taxon were randomly permuted (mean importance ± sem., n = 100 replicates). The inset shows 10-fold cross-validation error as a function of the number of input taxa used to regress against the age of yaks in the training set, in order of variable importance. c, f Microbiota age predictions plotted against chronological age. The curve is a smoothed spline fit between microbiota age and chronological age

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