Gut microbiota ecology: Biodiversity estimated from hybrid neutral-niche model increases with health status and aging

and θabundant (S7 Fig, Table 2) or by the Hill2 number (Table 2), suggesting again that estimat- ing biodiversity with the 2NB models allows to achieve higher statistical power. Conclusions We presented here an ecological model capable of describing the GM ecosystem. Our model is a hybrid niche-neutral model composed of two neutral and non-interacting populations that respectively include the least abundant (rare) and the most abundant (abundant) bacterial Fig 5. GM biodiversity and healthy aging status. Box-plots representing the distribution of GM biodiversity (θrare on the left and θabundant on the right) in the healthy elderly, young controls and unhealthy elderly subjects from the ELDERMET data set at T0. Mann-Whitney U-test p-values are reported for each pairwise comparison. Both biodiversity indices were adjusted for sex and total number of reads before computing the box-plots and hypothesis tests. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237207.g005 Table 2. AUC of ROC of the predictive models of health status in old age. Biodiversity index AUC of ROC Without aging parameters With aging parameters θrare + θabundant 0.701 0.76 θrare 0.724 0.77 θabundant 0.701 0.766 Hill1 0.636 0.757 Hill2 0.648 0.763 Simpson 0.645 0.745 Shannon 0.649 0.759 Pielou 0.645 0.751 Only sex + # of reads 0.644 0.759 All models were adjusted for sex and total number of reads (# of reads). The last row refers to models in which GM biodiversity was not included. The two columns “With aging parameters” and “Without aging parameters” refers to

models in which calf circumference, BMI and the inflammatory markers IL-6, IL-8, IL-10, TNFa and CRP were or were not included as explanatory variables. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237207.t002 PLOS ONE Gut microbiota biodiversity and healthy aging PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237207 October 30, 2020 11 / 23