Statistical Analysis
Alpha diversity was ascertained using the phyloseq R package to calculate the observed species richness and Chao1 for estimated species richness, and Shannon and Simpson indices for species evenness and richness with the rarefaction set at 1091. Beta diversity testing was performed using principal coordinates analysis (PCoA) for multidimensional scaling of the EBC samples to determine dissimilarity between the healthy control and asthma groups using the basic ‘stats’ R package. T-tests were performed to assess the statistical difference between the control and asthma groups, where p <0.05 was considered statistically significant. R version 3.6.3 was used for all analyses.