Contraceptive use causes shifts in bacterial community profiles
To assess the effect of contraceptive use or a covariate on bacterial community profiles, we compared inter-community (between sample) distance within categorical groupings (e.g. randomized arm, study site, STI status etc.) against the across-group centroid using a PERMANOVA. We found no significant clustering of samples by enrollment randomization arm using Bray-Curtis distance (PERMANOVA We generated Bayesian directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), which are useful for inferring relationships between microbial communities