Fig. 2: Groupings of infant gut microbiomes.

a Principal Coordinate Analysis (PCoA) of infant gut microbiomes with the Aitchison distance used to measure the similarity between samples. Clustering was performed with Dirichlet Multinomial Mixtures on species level counts, generating three clusters based on lowest Laplace approximation. b Significant associations were observed between the clusters and both birth mode (chi-squared < 0.01) and feeding mode (chi-squared < 0.05), with C3 having more C-section births, C2 having more vaginal births, and C1 having a preponderance of breastfed infants (C1 n = 99, C2 n = 151, C3 n = 162, vaginal birth n = 273, C-section n =  139, breastfed n = 222, mixed feeding n = 138, formula fed n = 52). c Genus-level relative abundance of bacterial taxa across three distinct clusters (C1, C2, and C3). Each cluster is visualized with a bar plot representing mean genus abundance, where genera are color-coded according to their corresponding phylum. The top species contributor for each phylum within each cluster is labeled above the corresponding genus bar. Additionally, each bar plot is accompanied by a pie chart that summarizes the overall phylum distribution for that cluster.