Extended Data Fig. 8: Deducing the effect of spatial partitioning on a groundwater community.
From: Modulation of microbial community dynamics by spatial partitioning
a. The experimental setup of the groundwater study. Partitioning increases with higher dilution due to the decrease of local community sizes and reduced number of interactions. Serial dilution introduces two additional variables: the decrease of initial cell densities and subsampling of the initial community that occurs with increasing levels of dilution. b. Negligible impact of initial cell density on final community diversity. 10 randomly generated 1000-member community were simulated with increasing dilution rate, which is equivalent to decreasing density of the initial community (grey dots). Data are represented as mean values + /- SD with N=10. c. Estimated global initial community structure. The population abundance distribution loosely follows power law, which approximates the distribution pooled final communities of different dilution levels, especially at 10X and 102X. The estimated abundance distribution of the original sample is based on power-law distribution and an estimate of 5000 total OTUs, which is feasible compared with 399 OTUs that are sequenced in the final communities that account for both 10X dilution and OTUs that were not able to grow. d. Comparison between the measured richness at each dilution level and the estimated richness of initial communities. The baseline is the mean sampled from the estimated community composition of the original sample by simulating serial dilution. The error bars of the baseline are the standard deviation across 10 simulated samplings (n=10). The # of OTU present was calculated from the published data. Dilution of 104 in anaerobic condition has no OTU present and it is thus not shown. e. Biphasic dependence of a groundwater community. The community was analyzed in both anaerobic (NO3) and aerobic (O2) culture conditions. Down sampling due to dilution was accounted for to estimate the number of OTUs sampled at t0. Y-axes indicate the percentage of OTUs that are present at tf (after culturing) out of the number of sampled OTUs at t0 (see SI for detailed method). Data are represented as mean values + /- SD with N=10.
