Fig. 1.

The geographic distribution of samples and microbial diversity evaluation. A: The geographic distribution of samples from five countries after the PSM procedure. B: The Venn diagram illustrating the number of species between IBS patients (pink) and healthy controls (light blue). C: The pie chart representing the composition of 131 IBS-exclusive genera identified from the Venn diagram. D–F: The rain-cloud plot showing the difference in alpha diversity between the IBS and healthy controls using the Shannon index (D), Simpson index (E) and Richness (F). G: PCoAs of Bray‒Curtis distances on the microbiota distributions. Each dot represents a patient with IBS or healthy controls. Points clustered in pink and light-blue eclipses represent the gut microbial composition of the IBS and controls, respectively. The boxplots around the PCoA plot represent the Bray-Curtis distances of Axis1 (the top boxplot) and Axis2 (the right-sided boxplot). The difference in alpha diversity index and Bray-Curtis distances of Axis1 and Axis2 was calculated using the Wilcoxon Rank Sum Test, and p < 0.05 was considered statistical significance. PERMANOVA test was performed, and p < 0.05 was considered statistical significance. IBS: irritable bowel syndrome; PCoAs: principal coordinate analyses