Fig. 1

Alpha- and beta-diversity of the gut microbiota in postmenopausal women. A violin plots of alpha-diversity indices; B heatmap of the genus-level rarefied abundance, columns (samples) and rows (taxa) were subjected to average linkage method and genus-level Bray-Curtis distance hierarchical clustering, top annotation—color bars reflect identified clusters, C bar plot of relative abundance on phylum level, D heatmap of the metabolic pathway-level rarefied abundance, columns (samples) and rows (taxa) were subjected to average linkage method and genus-level Bray-Curtis distance hierarchical clustering, top annotation—color bars reflect identified clusters; Samples were grouped using hierarchical clustering based on the inter-sample genus-level (Fig. 1B) or metabolic pathway-level (Fig. 1D) Bray-Curtis dissimilarities calculated using the rarefied abundance table. B A high taxonomic diversity which was highlighted by the presence of 9 clusters of unequal size containing from just 1 to 26 samples. D two larger clusters, containing 27 and 12 samples, were identified. Bray-Curtis distances calculated on higher taxonomic levels did not affect clustering implying a persistent high taxonomic diversity in this group (Additional file 1: Fig. S2)