Fig. 2: Overall alpha diversity and bacterial distribution in study groups.

Microbiome composition for all study groups that include a species level assignments post filtering to include those bacteria whose relative abundance ≥0.01% in each of the 180 participants from Kinshasa (Kin) (n = 30, mean = 473.2), Masi-Manimba (Mas) (n = 30, mean = 552.1), Unaffected Low Prevalence Zone (ULPZ) (n = 30, mean = 502.4), Konzo Low Prevalence Zone (KLPZ) (n = 30, mean = 494.3), Unaffected High Prevalence Zone (UHPZ) (n = 30, mean = 594.5), and Konzo High Prevalence Zone (KHPZ) (n = 30, mean = 606.2). b Shannon Index measures post filtering that includes species in each participant that had a relative abundance ≥0.01 from Kinshasa (n = 30, mean = 3.918), Masi-Manimba (n = 30, mean = 3.996), ULPZ (n = 30, mean = 3.897), KLPZ (n = 30, mean = 3.9), UHPZ (n = 30, mean = 4.186), and KHPZ (n = 30, mean = 4.217). c Highly abundant genus level assignments in the study groups (standard deviation for genus measures can be found in Supplementary File 2). d Z-score Heat map representation of the average relative abundances of the 694 species that passed the ≥0.01% relative abundance in either of the six study groups. In a and b, data are represented as boxplots where the diamond denotes the mean, middle line in the box is the median, the lower hinge is the first quartile, the upper hinge is the third quartile, and the whiskers extend from the lower and upper hinges to the smallest and largest value, respectively, at most to 1.5 * IQR (IQR, interquartile range, is the distance between the first and third quartile), with each individual value plotted.