Supplementary Figure 7: Parenthood shapes the immune system towards a shared equilibrium in an age-independent fashion.

(a) 138 individuals were identified as adult (18-65 years) biological parents with a child still living at home. The immune profile of age-independent parameters only was compressed using multidimensional scaling (k=2) of the correlation matrix between individuals, visualising pairwise Spearman’s correlation coefficients between each individual. The immunological distance between each male:female pair is indicated by the connecting gray line. (b) The age-independent immunological distance, as measured by multidimensional scaling, between parental pairs versus random male:female pairs. To generate the random distribution, each male was computationally paired in a random fashion with 5 females from the parental dataset. Distributions were compared using a two-tailed Mann-Whitney test.