Fig. 4

Simulation of a shift in diet. We used simulated annealing to model a shift in diet from FORG to CONC (red hues). The average compound distribution of the eight CONC animals was used as a target and the eight FORG animals as the starting points (Materials and Methods). We used two different sampling schemes in the simulated annealing: Single-read exchanges moved reads from one node to another until the resulting compound vector was minimally different from the target (triangles), while paired read exchanges moved two reads at a time under the constraint that the two nodes that both reads originated from and the two nodes that they moved to had to, in each case, be connected by an edge (circles). Shown in green hues are the parallel simulations that started with FORG animals but used the average FORG compound vector as a target. On the x-axis we show the results of pairwise comparisons in compound distance between all combinations the eight simulated animals, using for each its best simulated annealing run. The open points show, for reference, the distribution seen in the real animals. On the y-axis are the pairwise node distances for these same comparisons