Fig. 2
Bacterial community of thalassemia patients are less diverse and distinct compared to healthy subjects’ microbiome profile. Box plots displaying (a) Shannon index and (b) Faith’s phylogenetic diversity index in two different groups. These values were compared to others in a pairwise manner with the Kruskal-Wallis test (α = 0.05). (c) Non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) biplot based on Aitchison distance. MetaMDS and envfit functions (vegan package) in R were calculated and used to display correlations between microbial community compositions and environment metadata. Dots represent individual samples, where blue color represents normal and red color represents disease group. Vectors (arrows) represent the direction of metadata in relation to normal or disease groups. The comparison between two groups (Normal vs. Disease) of box plots was calculated based on the Wilcoxon test.
