Figure 6.

Transcriptional activity of oral taxa differentiates autism spectrum disorder (ASD) participants. The ability of taxonomic RNA profiles to identify ASD status was explored with multivariate logistic regression analyses and visualized on receiver operator characteristic curve. The first 50% of subjects in each comparison were used to build cross-validation (CV) curves (blue), that were tested in the remaining 50% of naïve holdout samples (pink). Five ratios, involving eight taxa differentiated ASD and typically developing (TD) children with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.795 (95% Confidence interval (CI): 0.711–0.872) on CV and 0.796 on holdout testing (A). Three ratios, involving five taxa differentiated ASD and developmental delay (DD) children with an AUC of 0.770 (95% CI: 0.643–0.867) on CV and 0.765 on holdout testing (B). Finally, three ratios, involving five taxa identified ASD children with gastrointestinal (GI) disturbance relative to ASD peers without GI disturbance in both CV (AUC = 0.839; 95% CI: 0.759–0.958) and holdout models (AUC = 0.857) (C).