Figure 1: Effectiveness of culturing conditions for recovery of human gut bacterial community.

(a) The percentage of viable cells that we were able to culture. It was determined by dividing the GM7 plate counts by the trypan blue viable cell counts. The viable cells cultured were calculated for faecal samples obtained from two human subjects over three time points to show reproducibility across time and subjects. (b) An order-level taxonomic comparison of all tested media and the culture-independent (Cult-Ind.) sample based on tag abundance (Sample D1-T1). The order of the taxa is by abundance of the culture-independent sample. Bacterial taxa represented by less than five sequences for all samples are not displayed. (c) An assessment of each culture media’s effectiveness for the recovery of the human gut bacterial community. The smaller the Morisita–Horn dissimilarity index (range from 0 to 1) and larger the percentage of recovered viable cells, the better the culture media represented the culture-independent community. The x axis represents the Morisita–Horn index and the y axis indicates the percentage of viable cells cultured on each media (Sample D1-T1).