Fig. 2

PMA-treatment resulted in different degrees of compositional changes in different complex communities. Our second evaluation of PMA-seq used four environmental microbial community types (high and low biomass, high and low expected viability) spiked with varying levels of cultured / heat-killed E. coli. a Relative abundances of 15 taxa detected with the highest mean abundance across all samples. Each sample type contains four biological replicates. b Bray-Curtis distances within and between community samples with PMA treatment and samples without PMA treatment. Columns labeled with the sample type alone (e.g., screen) show dissimilarities within the indicated PMA-free samples. Those annotated “type(PMA)” (e.g., screen(PMA)) show calculations within the PMA-treated samples, and “type(between)” (e.g., screen(between) represents distances between paired samples with and without PMA treatment. c After constructing an ordination based on each sample pairwise Bray-Curtis dissimilarity, variation across the first explanatory axes is largely separated by human-associated uses, while the second axes appear to be explained by sample biomass. Here, lines connect identical samples with and without PMA treatment