0.075 mg/ml, Jackson Lab, WestGrove, PA) for 60 min. The slides were then washed and mounted with coverslips using ProLong Gold anti-fade reagent with DAPI (Invitrogen). The slides were imaged with a confocal microscope (Nikon).

Gut and liver microbiome analysis
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The fecal content was collected from the gut region encompassing the distal cecum and approximately one inch of the colon. The gut tissue was washed and stored separately. The fecal matter was lysed using glass beads in MagnaLyser tissue disruptor (Roche), and the total DNA was isolated using a Power-soil/fecal DNA isolation kit (Mo-Bio) as per the manufacturer's specifications. All samples were quantified via the Qubit® Quant-iT dsDNA Broad-Range Kit (Invitrogen, Life Technologies, Grand Island, NY), to ensure that they met the minimum concentration and mass for DNA, and submitted to Second genome Inc. for microbiome analysis as follows. To enrich the sample for the bacterial 16 S V4 rDNA region, DNA was amplified using fusion primers designed against the surrounding conserved regions, which are tailed with sequences to incorporate Illumina (San Diego, CA) flow cell adapters and indexing barcodes. Each sample was PCR amplified with two differently bar coded V4 fusion primers and was submitted for pooling and sequencing. For each sample, amplified products were concentrated using a solid-phase reversible immobilization method for the purification of PCR products and quantified by electrophoresis using an Agilent 2100 Bioanalyzer®. The pooled 16 S V4 enriched, amplified, barcoded samples were loaded into the MiSeq® reagent cartridge and then onto the instrument along with the flow cell. After cluster formation on the MiSeq instrument, the amplicons were sequenced for 250 cycles with custom primers designed for paired-end sequencing. Using QIIME and custom scripts, the sequences were quality filtered and demultiplexed using exact matches to the supplied DNA barcodes. The resulting sequences were then searched a