Fig. 2

Early microbial assemblies associate with contrasting inflammatory outcomes. A Principal component analysis shows the linear projection of the 16S-based compositional profiles onto the first two components of the model. Each sample is labelled based on the DMM model-based cluster membership. B The heatmap summarises the 16S taxonomic profiles grouped by Dirichlet component (metacommunity/cluster) (cluster 1, n = 39; cluster 2, n = 39; cluster 3, n = 35). Rows represent OTUs, which are ordered from top to bottom based on their contribution to each metacommunity. For simplification, only the top 10 OTUs are represented. The intensity of the colour in the heatmap is proportional to the square-root of the relative abundance of each OTU. For each Dirichlet component, narrow columns represent BALF samples, and wide columns represent the component mean abundance of each OTU. C-E Box plots overlaid with density curves (violin plots, blue) representing the proportion of neutrophils (C) and the levels of IL8 (D) in BALF, and the proportion of the lung with structural disease (E), with respect to the different metacommunities. Groups were compared using the Wilcoxon rank-sum test and p-values corrected using the Bonferroni method: *, p < 0.05; ***, p < 0.001; n.s., p > 0.05