Fig. 4
Boxplots showing distribution of weighted UniFrac distances calculated between roommates versus between non-roommates collected over 9 data points across a period of 5 months. a Skin-to-skin and b gut-to-gut comparison between two individuals sharing the same room (roommates), individuals not having roommate association (non-roommates, i.e., randomly generated dataset in which each cadet was paired with a cadet who was not their roommate), individuals in the neighboring squadrons (i.e., squadron pairs in the same building, i.e., 1 and 2, 3 and 4, 19 and 20), and individuals residing in squadrons in different buildings (i.e., above squadron pairs compared with squadrons 27 and 28 located in a different building, which is 400 feet away). PERMANOVA p values (ppermanova) are mentioned for longitudinal comparisons of weighted UniFrac distances (skin versus skin or gut versus gut). Blue dashed lines represent the two vacations, which break the continuous sampling points. Two asterisks over two time points (i.e., after the vacation) indicate that the difference between the UniFrac distance measures at those specific time points is significant (p < 0.05) based on the PERMANOVA test. The dark lines inside the boxes of boxplots are medians and “+” represents the mean