Fig. 6: Abundance of relevant lactic acid bacteria, linamarase, and rhodanese in study populations.

a Boxplot distribution of relative abundance for L. mesenteroides, L. plantarum, and L. lactis. Statistics are based on pairwise comparisons using the Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon test and reported as expected BH-corrected p-value FDR < .05, two-sided Wilcoxon test, ALDEx2 (Supplementary Fig. 7). b Distribution of the abundance of β-glucosidase (KO 5350) [EC.3.2.1. 21] between the 6 study groups. Statistics are based on pairwise comparisons using the two-sided Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon test. c Distribution of the abundance of Rhodanese/thiosulfate/3-mercaptopyruvate sulfurtransferase (KO1011) [EC. 2.8.1.1/2.8.1.2] between the six study groups. Statistics are based on pairwise comparisons using the two-sided Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon test. In a–c, samples are from Kinshasa (Kin) (n = 30), Masi-Manimba (Mas) (n = 30), Unaffected Low Prevalence Zone (ULPZ) (n = 30), Konzo Low Prevalence Zone (KLPZ) (n = 30), Unaffected High Prevalence Zone (UHPZ) (n = 30), and Konzo High Prevalence Zone (KHPZ) (n = 30). Additionally, data are represented as boxplots where the 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). In a, outliers are plotted individually, and in b and c, each individual value is plotted.