Fig. 1: Gut microbiota composition based grouping of the Indian study population.

A Two clusters revealed through hierarchically clustered HITChip oligo profile (n = 214, biological replicates, complete hierarchical clustering of the log10 transformed HITChip probe signal oligo profile with Pearson similarity, see Methods) named here as Prevotella-driven Cluster-P and Bifidobacterium/Ruminococcus-driven Cluster-B/R. The intensity of the heat map relates to the relative abundance (%) of the major bacterial phylum, as shown in the legend. The stacked chart shows the relative abundance of the major discriminating taxa (p < 0.01, two-sided Wilcoxon test, corrected by the Benjamini-Hochberg method) between two clusters. B PCoA for the genus level community composition (Bray-Curtis dissimilarity for the relative abundance) shows the separation of the two clusters. C The diagram shows the shift of gut bacterial clusters over three-time points (seasons) sampling in the individuals of the study population. Cluster-P, blue-green and Cluster-B/R, orange-red. D–F The Box and whisker plots show the difference in the total bacterial load (total bacteria-specific qPCR assay, expressed as log 10 gene copies g^-1 of the wet faecal sample) (D), difference in bacterial diversity (generated from the HITChip probe profile) (E) and difference in the Bacillota/Bacteroidota ratio from HITChip probe signals and the taxa-specific qPCR assay (F) between the Cluster-P and Cluster-B/R. The Box and whisker plots display median (middle line), box ranges from 25 to 75 percentile with Tukey whiskers and outlier (more than 1.5 IQR). The statistical significance of the difference between the biological replicates of Cluter-P (n = 117) and Cluster-B/R (n = 97) was calculated by a two-sided Wilcoxon rank sum test with Bonferroni correction, and the p-values are indicated in the figure panel (D–F). The box colour of Cluster-P is blue-green, and Cluster-B/R is orange-red. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.