Fig. 2

Proportions of ten most abundant bacterial families over time. Four identical continuous-flow anaerobic bioreactor systems were each inoculated from a single human fecal specimen and cultured over the course of 1 month. Proportions of bacterial taxa at sampled time points were estimated by dividing observed read counts from 16S rRNA sequencing by the total number of counts observed for each sample. In addition to daily sampling (shown here), hourly samples were taken from each vessel (480 hourly samples total) as well as 20 technical replicate samples from the final time point of each vessel (Additional file 4). Proportions from the hourly sampling data are shown in Additional file 3. PCoA analysis using the Aitchison distance is shown in Additional file 5