FIG 1.

Eight-species microbial communities in the N2 intestine show distinct trends and variation. N2 worms were sampled from 12 independent experiments conducted over the course of ∼1 year. Each individual experiment contains data for 12 to 36 individual N2 worms taken from a single well. (A) CFU-per-worm data for the full data set of individual hosts (n = 164) after 4 days of colonization with this eight-species bacterial consortium. Each color represents a single host, and data are grouped by bacterial species to illustrate trends in abundance. (B) Average relative abundance of each bacterial species across all individual N2 worms. (C) Principal-component analysis (PCA) of community composition over time in N2 worms across a 6-day time series of colonization (24 individual worms/day, destructive sampling of individual hosts).