Figure 3

Heatmap showing the contributions of particular OTUs that characterize fecal samples of individuals 1 and 2. (A) Posterior probabilities for OTUs (same labels as in (B)) as determined by the model. (B) Empirical abundance of OTUs in samples collected in October 2009 and used to train the data (sample IDs listed on the right are from Caporaso et al. [1]). Note that 41 OTUs accounted for 95% of the posterior density for individual 1, and 86 OTUs accounted for 95% of the posterior density of individual 2. For clarity, we present only the 20 OTUs that have the highest posterior probability in each individual. For individual 1, the top 20 OTUs account for 90% of the posterior density. For individual 2, the top 20 OTUs account for 79% of the posterior density. The top 20 OTUs can be thought of as the “predominant” OTUs for each individual.