Metagenome association study (MAS) on microbiome feature abundances
bloating, pain
REGRESSION, REGRESSIONS
We executed a MAS between microbial feature (i.e., taxon/pathway) abundance and responder status, treatment, bloating, pain, and weekly/change in bowel movements. We looked at associations between these clinical variables and microbial feature abundances at baseline/endpoint where relevant (e.g., we did not compute the association between endpoint microbiome abundances and baseline WBMs). Prior to running the analysis, we took the natural log of all microbiome features and added a fudge factor of 0.00001. We additionally removed features that occurred in fewer than three samples.For binary outcome variables, we used logistic regression adjusted for baseline WBMs and age. For all other regressions (with continuous dependent variables), we used linear regression with a Gaussian link function. The only exception to our adjusting strategy was when baseline weekly WBMs were the outcome variable, in which case we did not include it as an independent variable as well. For each dependent variable, we adjusted for multiple hypothesis correction using the Benjamini–Yekutieli procedure.