Fig. 5: Rank-abundance distribution of mutations in host populations with and without a seed bank.

a Mutations were identified by sequencing and mapped to the genes which they affect. The multiplicity of a gene reflects the number of mutations observed in a gene given its length and was weighed by the frequency of those mutations in the population. Given genes of equal length (genes A, B and C) high multiplicity can arise from high mutation frequency in the population (gene A), multiple mutated sites (gene B), or a combination of the two. b For comparison among populations, we calculated the relative multiplicity, by normalizing the sum of multiplicities in each population to equal one. Each curve represents the relative gene multiplicity ranked by decreasing multiplicity values for a single population. Solid lines represent populations from the + phage treatment (n = 3) while dashed lines represent populations from the – phage treatment (n = 3). The effect of seed banks on the distribution of multiplicity was determined using a permutational Kolmogorov-Smirnov test.