FIGURE 2.

The sampling procedure (A) included collection of 3–4 particles (referred to, when pooled, as single particles; sPs) from parallel incubating rolling tanks (marked here as R1 and R2 for replicates 1 and 2) after which the remaining water, pooling lake particles (referred to as pooled particles; pPs) and microscopic fragments of inoculum particles were filtered on a 5 μm pore size filter. RNA was extracted and mRNA was enriched from each fraction collected. Pooled samples consist of equi-volume mixing of mRNA of two single particle or two pooled lake particles samples. The sampling schemes (B) depict the start and end of incubation times in April 2013. Samples were collected at the end of the incubation period. A subset of the functional annotation results is shown, demonstrating the different results obtain from single sample vs. pooled sample analysis in both single particles and pooled lake particles (C). In subsequent figures the first and second starting replicates of each incubation type (long or short) are named R1–R4 for replicates 1–4.