title: feces
design: The hypervariable region V3-V4 of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene were amplified with primer pairs 338F (5'-ACTCCTACGGGAGGCAGCAG-3') and 806R(5'-GGACTACHVGGGTWTCTAAT-3') byT100 Thermal Cycler PCR thermocycler (BIO-RAD, USA). The PCR product was extracted from 2% agarose gel and purified using the PCR Clean-Up Kit (YuHua, Shanghai, China) according to manufacturers instructions and quantified using Qubit 4.0 (Thermo Fisher Scientific, USA). Purified amplicons were pooled in equimolar amounts and paired-end sequenced on an Illumina PE300/ PE250 platform (Illumina, San Diego, USA) according to the standard protocols by Majorbio Bio-Pharm Technology Co. Ltd. (Shanghai, China). Operational taxonomic units (OTUs) with a 97% similarity cutoff were clustered using UPARSE version 7.1, and chimeric sequences were identified and removed.