Fig. 1

Beta diversity and alpha diversity measures of the ALL patients and controls samples. Bacterial beta diversity was measured with Bray-Curtis dissimilarity distances and visualised on NMDS plot. The samples were coloured according to sampling phase (pre-, during-, or post-chemo) or group (controls) and joined with the respective centroid (labelled with ‘C’). Pre-chemo sample was connected to the last sample Post-chemo with dotted arrow. PERMANOVA shows significant bacterial community differences among the groups (a). Bray-Curtis dissimilarity between the post-chemo samples (last timepoint) and controls was also compared (b). Microbiota dispersions were assessed based on distances from centroid (c). Shannon index and Chao1 index of the pre-chemo, during-chemo (average), post-chemo (last timepoint) samples of ALL patients and controls were also plotted on boxplots and comparison were made with Mann-Whitney tests (for unpaired samples) and Wilcoxon signed-rank test (for paired samples) (d, e)