Fig. 6

Volatile metabolites were measured in the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, identifying 92 annotated metabolites. (A) Partial Least Squares Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA) plot demonstrating the different clustering across treatment groups. (B) Top 15 features from the PLS-DA analysis were presented with variable importance in projection (VIP) scores and also visualised in (C) heat map using median normalized, log transformed values. (D − J) All 7 VOCs that were detected with statistical difference in multivariant analysis were presented. *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001, ****p < 0.0001 2-way ANOVA with multiple comparisons across all groups and Tukey’s post-hoc test. For each biological group, n = 6