Fig. 5

Comparison of gut microbiome in physically inactive participants vs. elite athletes. a Alpha diversity estimation of richness (Chao1) and diversity (InvSimp) are shown. b Nonmetric multidimensional scaling was used to visualize beta-diversity, i.e. samples’ Bray-Curtis dissimilarities. The stress of the NMDS plots was 0.26, indicating a poor goodness of fit. Marginal boxplots were added to visualize distribution of samples along axis. c ASVs found to be statistically more abundant in physically inactive participants or in elite athletes (adjusted P values < 0.05). Names of the bacteria genera are shown. Phascolarctobacterium and Ruminococcaceae (ASV classified to the family level) were abbreviated. A regression line was fit to illustrate the direction of change. d DNA concentration from Veillonella bacteria were quantified by qPCR using microbial DNA extracted from stool. No statistically significant difference was found for Veillonella between physically inactive participants and elite athletes