show Abstracthide AbstractLiver cirrhosis occurs as a consequence of many chronic liver diseases that are prevalent worldwide. Previous studies have shown an association between the gut microbiota and liver complications such as cirrhosis and other liver injuries. We therefore undertook a whole gut microbiome wide association study of stool samples from 98 liver cirrhosis patients and 83 healthy controls to characterise the faecal microbial communities and their functional composition. In total, we generated 860 Gb of high-quality sequence data and built a reference gene set for the liver cirrhosis cohort containing 2.69 million genes, 36.1% of which was not covered by previously published gene catalogues.