Fig. 2

Impact of storage of faecal samples at room temperature or + 4 °C on the composition of faecal phageomes and bacteriomes. a Outline of experimental protocol: fresh samples were collected from 4 individuals and subjected to two modes of storage with removal of aliquots for analysis at 0, 6 and 24 h. b Within- and between-subject Spearman distances of relative abundance values per sample in datasets obtained using metagenomic sequencing of phageomes and 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing. c, d PCoA plots based on Spearman distances calculated for 16S rRNA amplicon and phageome datasets, respectively. e, f Heatplots of relative abundances of selected bacterial RSVs and viral contigs (> 0.5% in any of the samples) across samples collected in the experiment