Fig. 5

Principle components analysis by niche based on the top nine most abundant OTUs and carbonyl accumulation. The colored symbols illustrate differences among the chronological sample cohorts; pink and orange are young and blue and green are old. The green vector illustrates carbonyl accumulation relative to community structure, shows strong affinity with increased Lactobacillus and B. asteroides in the gut, and is largely allied with the biologically oldest queen cohort (CA2). Orange symbols are biologically the youngest and consistently allied with P. apium in the hindgut and Acetobacteraceae Alpha 2.1 and Delftia throughout the system. Biplot constructed with normalized bacterial cell abundance data, transformed to centered log ratios (CLR) that represent the change in taxon abundance (covariance) relative to all other taxa in the data set. The species vectors are proportional to the standard deviation of the ratio of each taxon to all other taxa. In general, clustered groups of points contain similar groupings of taxa with similar ratio abundances, and longer OTU vectors result from greater variation in CLR scores. The parentheses below each niche label contain the percent variation explained by the first and second principle component respectively (Additional file 10: Table S10)