Figure 4
Heat map showing the relative abundance of selected abundant bacterial taxa.
The microbial assemblage structure was determined using the V4 region of 16S rDNA barcodes. The relative abundance of OTUs is reflected by the color of scale. The 500 most abundant OTUs (3% distance) were clustered in R-mode, resulting in three groups (or branches) and the groups I, II, III were characterized by different taxonomic compositions from B0, mesopelagic samples and epipelagic samples except B0, respectively. The three pie plots represent the average abundance of the bacterial OTUs at both phylum and class levels across all samples from groups I, II, III, respectively.
