Fig. 3

Microbial diversity between controls and dry eye cases, split into those who met full Sjögren’s-criteria (SDE) and those who did not (NDE) (a, b) and alternatively, classified based on the presence or absence of a comorbid autoimmune disease (CAD) (c, d). Among other α-diversity matrices shown in Table 3, two of the major indices Shannon’s H and Faith’s PD are displayed in the figure. For both parameters, Shannon’s diversity did not show any differences between the groups. Faith’s PD index showed significant differences between controls and SDE, and also between controls and the absence of a comorbid autoimmune disease