Figure 2.

Cross-study comparison of C. elegans and substrate microbiomes. (A) Principle coordinate analyses based on unweighted UniFrac distances shows distinct clustering of C. elegans (filled) from rotting fruit or compost substrates (open) regardless of the study of origin. A three-dimensional representation of the results is provided in Supplementary Video 1. The characteristics of the included samples is presented in Supplementary Table 1, while the identified OTUs and their abundances are given in Supplementary Table 2. All microcosm data sets (given in green) are from Berg et al. (2016a). All natural and lab enriched worm data sets (given in filled purple and magenta symbols) are from Dirksen et al. (2016). The substrate data sets for rotting stem are exclusively from Samuel et al. (2016), while those for vector and rotting fruits include data from both Dirksen et al. (2016) and Samuel et al. (2016), and those for compost are exclusively from Dirksen et al. (2016). C. elegans microbiotas are generally less diverse than substrates as assessed by Shannon alpha diversity indices (B), and exhibit more similar composition within each worm group than to substrates or between substrates (C). Non-parametric p-values ≤0.002 are noted: a, vs. substrates; b, vs. soil microcosm; c, vs. worm group.