Extended Data Fig. 9: Taylor’s power law relationships in human and mouse gut microbiota.

Temporal abundance variances \(\sigma _X^2\) as a function of average species abundances X in (a) human and (b) mouse gut microbiota. Dashed lines represent least-squares fits to the data using Taylor’s power law of the form \(\sigma _X^2 \propto X^\beta\). Each dot represents the mean and temporal abundance variance for a single OTU. a, The power law exponents in humans are β = 1.66 ± 0.09, 1.60 ± 0.08, 1.71 ± 0.07, 1.71 ± 0.07 for humans A, B, M3, and F4, respectively (mean ± s.d., n = 6 equal subsamples of the data, see Methods). Colored dots denote specific OTUs whose abundances on any day exceeded the average abundance over all other days by more than 25-fold (Supplementary Table 1). b, The power law exponents in mice are β = 1.49 ± 0.02 and 1.86 ± 0.07 for the LFPP and HFHS diets, respectively (mean ± s.d., across n = 3 mice). c, The temporal profile of relative abundances of spiking OTUs identified in (a) for the two humans (A and B), whose lifestyles were documented over the time series. Major events affecting the gut microbiota of these individuals included travel of individual A to a developing country near day 100, and an enteric infection in individual B near day 150.