FIG 4.

Pseudo-heat maps showing species diversity and relative abundance of species of LAB belonging to the genera Lactobacillus, Leuconostoc, and Lactococcus. Assignment of the sequences to the species level was performed by manually aligning representative sequences from all the amplicon read clusters attributed to each genus using the BLAST search tool (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast). The similarity score in all cases was greater than 97% when the sequences were compared to well-described 16S rRNA sequences. The color scale at the top indicates the percentages of the species in ingredients and environmental samples (i.e., 0 to 5%) (A) and in spoiled end products (i.e., 0 to 50%) (B).