These profound individual changes were, however, masked by remarkable within-state variation among the other subjects so that the average group-level fold change following the intervention was moderate and only borderline significant (log 10 FC=−0.39; P =0.08; paired Wilcoxon test).
fragilis (false discovery rate (FDR)<5%), and showed a trend (FDR<20%) towards positive association with Dialister spp. and a negative association with the Prevotella group ( Supplementary Table 4 ).
Whereas the observed states were robust to short-term dietary differences, which could not explain the observed population-level bimodal patterns, this does not exclude the possibility that targeted dietary interventions could be potentially used to manipulate specific bimodal groups in a personalized manner; we did observe state shifts in individual subjects following dietary interventions, but these changes were masked by the overall within-state variation in the other subjects and did not reach statistical significance in our limited intervention data.