Fig. 2

MGSs in AS patients and healthy controls and association with clinical indices. a The abundance of 12 MGSs are shown as heatmaps: the discovery set (n = 156) is on the left and the validation set (n = 55) is on the right. The colors denote the variation in abundance (white indicates zero; black indicates the highest abundance). b The association between MGSs and clinical index is shown in the middle: the darker the color, the greater the intensity. Violet indicates a positive correlation with each index (the index partition in first row), green indicates a negative correlation with each index (the index partition in first row). The 25 genes in each MGS for which the mean abundance values were the highest are shown in the heatmap. c On the right of the heatmap, the Wilcoxon rank-sum test p values for the mean abundance of the 25 “marker genes” are indicated. Above the heatmap, the color key shows how the color variation indicates the abundance. d The networks of the 12 MGSs reflect the interaction between them. The notes represent the MGSs and the note size is proportional to the mean abundance of the genes in the MGS. The red lines represent the negative correlation between the two notes and the blue lines represent the positive correlation between the two notes. e The Venn diagram of the MGS in AS Project, LC Project, T2D Project, T2D European Women Project, and Obesity Project (Additional file 1: Table S11)