Fig. 5. Longitudinal sampling can be done over the course of several weeks in normal situations without perturbations.

There is no similarity decay in microbiota composition over 4 weeks. Linear model of log-transformed similarities (= 1 - community dissimilarities (BC)) between time points of interpolated QMP time series against the number of days elapsed (R² = 0.013, P > 0.05). Data points of each day were randomly subsampled to the lowest amount of observations for a day. Length of the evaluated time span was limited to include data of all 20 participants at each value (1–36 days).