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.