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Table 3 Similarity of the upper and lower airway microbiota

From: The microbiota in bronchoalveolar lavage from young children with chronic lung disease includes taxa present in both the oropharynx and nasopharynx

Comparison

Number of children

Bray-Curtis similarity median (95 % CI)

PERMANOVA

Variation between specimen types

Variation between children

Residual variation

p

Pseudo-F (df)

%CoV

p

Pseudo-F (df)

%CoV

%CoV

NP and OP

65

10.1 (8.2–12.6)

0.0001*

35.3 (1)

35.5

0.001*

1.2 (64)

15.7

48.8

Lavage-1 and Lavage-2

57

70.9 (63.2–74.0)

0.72

0.8 (1)

n/a

0.0001*

6.01 (57)

61.4

38.6

NP and Lavage-1

65

25.6 (22.3–28.8)

0.0001*

21.9 (1)

25.3

0.0001*

1.9 (64)

30.1

44.6

OP and Lavage-1

65

54.5 (44.9–57.6)

0.0001*

12.2 (1)

17.9

0.0001*

2.7 (64)

39.2

42.9

Upper and Lavage-1

65

53.5 (48.4–56.7)

0.0001*

6.8 (1)

13.0

0.0001*

3.0 (64)

43.4

43.5

Upper and lower

49

55.5 (51.7–58.6)

0.0001*

4.9 (1)

12.1

0.0001*

3.2 (48)

45.1

42.8

  1. The microbiota in paired Lavage-1 and Lavage-2 specimens showed high similarity, whereas the microbiota in paired OP and NP swabs were distinct. Lavage-1 microbiota was significantly different to the OP and NP microbiota. The highest similarity between the upper and lower airway data was obtained by combining OP with NP data (to represent the upper airways) and Lavage-1 with Lavage-2 data (to represent the lower airways). All analyses were performed using a Bray-Curtis similarity matrix based on square root transformed OTU-level data. CoV is the estimated components of variation and indicates the data variability due to the specified factor. Comparisons were limited to the 73 children whose paired specimens each returned >1025 16S rRNA gene sequence reads (Fig. 1). Lavage-2 data were only available for a subset of children
  2. n/a not applicable
  3. *Indicates significant results