FIGURE 3.

Quantification of bacterial divergence (heterogeneity/spread) within given samples by the mean sample dissimilarity or beta diversity. Taking average, over all pairwise dissimilarities is sensitive to sample size and heavily biased as the similarity values are not independent. To reduce this bias, the dissimilarity of each sample against the group mean is calculated. Here, CS-F sample divergence is 0.1, whereas CS-12H sample divergence is 0.23. These can be compared between groups in order to compare differences in group homogeneity.