Fig. 3

(a) Heatmap illustrating the correlations between differential species and serum cytokines. (b) Associations between differential species and microbial functions, differential metabolites. The lower triangle shows the associations between differential species, while the lines demonstrate the correlations between differential species and differential metabolites, as well as the correlations between differential species and microbial functions. (c) Scatter diagram showing the associations between differential microbial function potentials, metabolites enriched in pathway ‘Steroid hormone biosynthesis’, and TNFα. (d) The relative abundance of microbial function potentials correlated positively with TNFα