Figure 5

Mean percentage of reads ascribed to bacterial phyla, and classes within the Proteobacteria, in the duplicate metagenomes obtained from each mat community of (A) the drying thermal gradient and (B) the wet thermal gradient. The 21 phyla and five proteobacterial classes represented account for >0.1% reads in at least one of the 16 metagenomes analyzed. The category ‘others’ encompasses the phyla that accounted for <0.1% reads in every metagenome analyzed. Statistical significance of the fluctuations in the relative abundance of the taxa along the hydrothermal gradients can be seen in Supplementary Figs. 4 and 5 where their mean relative abundance within each mat community has been plotted alongside the two original relative abundance values obtained from the duplicate metagenomes (shown as vertical range bar in Supplementary Figs. 4 and 5).