Rank-abundance evaluation of the variable 16S rRNA regions from the lake survey dataset.

<div><p>A: Rank-abundance plot of the complete dataset for each of the three variable regions, where abundance data was added up for all of the 20 lakes, plotted on log-log scale. Vertical dashed lines show the range of the rank-abundance plot (ranks 12 to 440) for which we found a significant difference between the rank-abundance distributions of V4 to V3 and V5. For the same region, the V3 and V5 rank-abundance distributions did not differ significantly from each other (significant Kolomogorov-Smirnov (KS) test: p < 0.05).</p> <p>B: Example rank-abundance plot of the rarefied data for one lake (Murtensee), plotted on log-log scale. X-axis: OTU rank, y-axis: OTU abundance.</p> <p>C: Result of KS-test using rank-abundance data of the individual lakes. X-axis: compared regions, y-axis: p-value distribution of KS test, dashed line plotted at p-value of 0.05. Each dot represents the comparison of rank-abundance curves from two regions of the same lake. P-values below 0.05 indicate a significant difference between the the rank-abundance distributions, whereas p-values above 0.05 indicate that there are no significant differences between two rank-abundance distributions.</p>