Table 1.
Most bacterial phylotypes are only found on very few humans; only a minority is more widespread.
Figure 1.
The frequency of bacteria phylotypes (each point = a phylotype) in our first sample of human belly buttons predicts most of the variation in the frequency of the same phylotypes in our second sample.
The size of circles corresponds to the number of reads of each phylotype, where reads are a proxy for abundance. 1380 points are plotted here, though many fall on top of each other.
Figure 2.
Distribution of pairwise phylogenetic distances among phylotypes.
The 23 most frequent phylotypes (which were also, on average, abundant and accounted for 50% of the bacterial reads we encountered) are derived from very few, related, clades (green; 23 phylotypes that occur on >50% of samples; mean pairwise Kimura 2-parameter distance = 0.070), while the remainder of phylotypes were phylogenetically dispersed (blue histogram; distribution of mean pairwise phylogenetic distances among the remaining 2345 phylotypes).