Fig 2. Non-metric multidimensional scaling using Jaccard binary index of the spirotrich community shows the considerable variability among biological replicates when communities are incubated with three different kinds of phytoplankton.

A, B, and C represent the replicates. ‘Starting community’ is the community before incubation. ‘Control’ represents the community incubated without perturbation. ‘Diatoms’, ‘Haptophyte’ and ‘Chlorophyte’ represent the incubation with addition of phytoplankton. Left is the nanosize and right the microsize fraction. The top panels are the abundant spirotrich ciliates assessed by DGGE and the bottom are the spirotrich ciliates assessed by HTS.