Fig. 5

Altered bacterial metabolic pathways define ME/CFS and ME/CFS subgroup with IBS co-morbidity. Histogram of the log-transformed LDA scores computed with LEfSe for bacterial metabolic pathways found to be differentially abundant between ME/CFS groups and controls. Positive LDA score indicates enrichment of pathways in a ME/CFS, b ME/CFS + IBS, and c ME/CFS without IBS vs. controls. Negative LDA indicates enrichment of pathways in control subjects (reduced in ME/CFS groups). The LDA score indicates the effect size and ranking of each superpathway. An alpha value of 0.05 for the Kruskal-Wallis test and a log-transformed LDA score of 2.0 were used as thresholds for significance in LEfSe analyses. Asterisks next to pathways indicate significant differences were also found for a given pathway based on nonparametric Mann-Whitney U test with Benjamini-Hochberg correction (adjusted p < 0.2)