Correlations between measurements of each circulating biomarker in the host and the taxonomic or functional profiles of the microbiota were analyzed using Spearman’s rank correlation implemented in the Hmisc package in R and visualized using ggplot2 and gplots packages in R. Significance thresholds for the coefficients of association and P-values were respectively set at rho (ρ) ≥ |0.3| and p-value≤0.05, Benjamini-Hochberg (BH) adjusted for multiple hypothesis testing.