Fig. 4.

Quantitative comparisons of microbiota between various sample types. Richness (a) as indicated by number of unique taxa (genus discovery) assignments, α-diversity (b) as measured through inverse Simpson index, and evenness (c) of microbiota as Pielou’s evenness index at the genus level among various sample matrices are depicted by box-and-whisker plots. Boxes represent the interquartile ranges (upper line is the 75% quantile, and the lower line is the 25% quantile), the lines inside the boxes are the medians, the whiskers span the range of the 25% quantile or the 75% quantile plus 1.5 times the interquartile range, and dots are outliers