FIG 5.

MicDrop prebiotic assay carried out on fecal samples from nine individuals. (A) Microbial carbohydrate preferences for 298 SVs from nine healthy human donors. We defined primary degraders as SVs that grew on at least one polysaccharide. Rows (SVs) were clustered by calculating the Euclidean distance between prebiotic growth profiles. A cutoff between clusters 1 and 2 was set visually to reflect how subtrees of SVs were generally characterized by growth on either a single carbohydrate or multiple carbohydrates. (B to D) The number of primary degraders (B), the stool abundance of primary degraders of a given prebiotic (C), and the ratio of specialists (i.e., those that grew on only one carbon source) to generalists (i.e., those that grew on multiple carbon sources) for each participant and carbon source (D). Primary degraders (PD) were normalized by glucose consumers (GC) to control for potential differences in overall microbiota viability. Participant ordering in panels B to D is sorted by median values of primary degrader counts per participant. (E) Numbers of SVs from a given phylum observed to grow on different numbers of carbon sources (red), and counts expected by chance (blue). (F) SVs plotted according to the number of participants they were found in and the number of carbon sources they degraded. Spearman correlation reported.