Figure 2.

Microbiome fingerprinting shows influence of lifestyle factors but not nursling age. Metataxonomics using amplicon sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene shows no significant separation (PERMANOVA p value above 0.05) in beta diversity for (a) age of nursling nor (b) expression method using principal coordinate analysis. Shading shows 95% confidence intervals of groupings. Additionally, (c) lifestyle factors were correlated with microbiome features at the finest taxonomic resolution achieved. Size of dot indicates size of correlation and only positive correlations were significant, with p value below 0.05. A total of 46 human milk replicates were used in this analysis.