Figure 4

Non-metric Multidimensional Scaling (NMDS) ordination plot of endometrial bacterial community composition, in healthy and metritic cows. The axes and dimensions in NMDS are arbitrary. The “stress” value is a goodness of fit measure, representing how well the low dimensionality (3D) ordination represents the actual multi-dimensional (969D, as the number of OTUs) distance between each pair of samples. The lower the stress, the better the ordination. Stress values between 0.2 and 0.1 are considered acceptable. Notice the clustering of metritic cows (red and orange), in contrast to the more dispersed population of healthy cows (green). The biopsy metritic cows seem to be a subgroup of the swab metritis group, perhaps owing to differential penetration of bacteria from the lumen and epithelial surface (swab samples) to the interior structures of the uterine wall (biopsy samples).