Fig. 2

Distribution of within-group abundances in a representative lottery-like genus (Akkermansia) and in a non-lottery-like genus (Blautia). a Heatmaps showing the normalized within-group abundance of OTUs in the Akkermansia and Blautia genera. Here we only show the three most abundant OTUs of Blautia for ease of comparison with Akkermansia. The bar plots on the top indicate the sum of the genus abundance in each sample. Only samples in which the genus’ abundance is > 0.5% were included. Samples have been ordered first by the identity of the most abundance OTU (with vertical lines separating set of samples with different most abundant OTU) and second within each such set of samples by decreasing abundance of that most abundant OTU. b Point plots showing the normalized abundance of OTUs in each genus across samples. Samples have been ordered in an identical way to that described in a. The dashed red line denotes the 0.9 cutoff used to define lottery winners. In contrast to a, here we included all OTUs in the group. c A histogram displaying the Shannon entropy of the within-group abundances within each sample for Akkermansia and Blautia. The red dotted line corresponds to the Shannon diversity in an idealized group in which the abundances of all OTUs are uniformly spread