Fig. 3

Clustering of the prepartum fecal bacterial community of cows with distinct SARA susceptibility based on Bray–Curtis distance (a); heatmap of the fecal bacterial community indicating the Bray–Curtis distance between prepartum and postpartum fecal bacterial communities within the same cow (b); comparison of Bray–Curtis distance observed in Fig. 3b among susceptible (SU), moderate (MO), and unsusceptible (UN) groups (c); principal-coordinate analysis (PCoA) based on Bray–Curtis dissimilarities in the composition of fecal bacterial communities at the amplicon sequence variant (ASV) level sampled either at prepartum d 7 or postpartum d 21 (d). Postpartum grouping: susceptible group (SU; n = 10): mean or median of time below pH 6 of at least 180 min/d; moderately susceptible group (MS; n = 7): 60 min/d < mean time of pH below 6 < 180 min/d and median time of pH below 6 < 180 min/d; moderately unsusceptible group (MU; n = 11): 10 min/d < mean time of pH below 6 < 60 min/d and median time of pH below 6 ≤ 30 min/d; unsusceptible group (UN; n = 10): median time pH below 6 = 0 min/d and mean time pH below 6 < 10 min/d. Due to early calving, the UN-group only contained nine animals in the prepartum period and MS (n = 3) and MU (n = 7) cows were merged into a single group (MO, n = 10)