Fig. 4
Association between plasma metabolome and gut microbiome. a Multiple dimensional scaling (MDS) plot of procrustes analysis showing overall association between plasma metabolome and gut microbiome in MDD and HC cohorts, with individual samples being connected by a line. Euclidean distance was used for plasma metabolome (green circles), while Bray–Curtis distance for gut microbiome data (red circles), and the procrustes m2 statistic results were labeled. b Compared to HCs, the variance of plasmas metabolite explained by gut microbiota was significantly higher in MDD patients. The extent of variance explained was quantified using the r.2 statistic derived from a lasso model. c Association network between plasma metabolites and microbial species generated from glmmLasso models. The analysis presented only those metabolites that showed significant alterations in response to ESC treatment. Node size indicates degree, different shapes represent metabolites (circles) and microbes (triangles), different colors of nodes represent up-regulated (red) and down-regulated (green) after ESC intervention, negative correlations are shown in blue, while positive correlations are shown in red. d Scatter plot revealing the spearman's correlation between the species richness and indole-3-propionic acid (I3PA) at three visit weeks. The significant positive correlations were only observed at baseline and week 12