Table 2.

The shared contributions of diet, exercise and variables of biological relevance on the variance observed in microbiome composition using distance-based linear modelling

Variable	SS	Pseudo-F	P-Value	R2	Cumulative R2
Diet	18,456	14.502	0.001	0.266	0.266
Exercise	1686.7	1.337	0.073	0.024	0.290
Liver triglyceride content	2157.7	1.742	0.008	0.031	0.321
WAT Il6 expression	1822	1.490	0.027	0.026	0.347

Sequential multiple regression (captured by the Bray-Curtis similarity matrix at the OTU level, max 1000 permutations) involves interrogating the conditional contribution of each variable in order of entry into the model (to determine whether variables contribute significantly to the variance explained in the presence of other variables); here, diet and exercise conditions were added before any metabolic predictors were considered and the final model containing only statistically significant covariates is shown. Metabolic predictors included in the sequential regression were selected based on their predictive value, while trying to eliminate variables with high covariance; N = 42–46