Fig. 5

Metabolic pathways important for carbohydrate metabolism and energy production were upregulated in conjunction with methane metabolism. Spearman’s rank correlation coefficients and corresponding p values were calculated in R to determine what KEGG pathways were upregulated along with methane metabolism. A heatmap using expression data of these pathways was generated with cyclists’ samples clustered using the BC distance metric. Included on the dendrogram branches are assigned AU p values. All nine pathways shown are significantly correlated with each other (p < 0.05). For cyclist sample names, ‘C’ indicates a CAT 1 (amateur) cyclist and ‘P’ depicts a professional cyclist