Figure 4.

Pairwise comparison of Bray-Curtis distances for 29 sputum samples from 21 patients with bronchiectasis, using nonmetric multidimensional scaling (nMDS) analysis. Considerable overlap between communities in samples from patients in each group can be discerned, with differences in community composition not reflecting to which cohort an individual patient/sample belonged. A limited shift in community composition within individuals after antibiotic treatment was also apparent, with samples from individual patients clustering closely together. Clinically stable samples (C), n = 10; exacerbation samples, n = 19 (start of treatment [SOT], n = 11; end of treatment [EOT], n = 5; stable after exacerbation [ST], n = 3). Red boxes group together samples collected from the same patient at various time points.