Figure 8. Comparison of Winogradsky column microbial communities to uncultured microbial communities.

Samples from individual columns were pooled together to generate a single community for each column. MG-RAST was used to compare twelve samples from each of soil, marine sediment, creek, marine water, lake, and fecal biomes selected from previous metagenomics experiments (Caporaso et al.) targeting the V4 region of 16s rRNA (using single end sequencing of the 5′ end). These samples were compared to our data using the taxonomically-based Bray-Curtis index.