Figure 2

The ability to refine the taxonomic selection facilitates exploration of both the more abundant and the less abundant taxa. We illustrate this capability with bar charts, but these selection options are available for other analyses. A demonstrates an initial view of the moderately abundant (> = 1%) bacteria in the public water at a Falmouth, MA distribution point during October and November of 2011. Sphingomonas is the vast majority of all but one of these 5 datasets and is masking the other bacteria. To better identify the patterns within the rest of the microbial community, we can remove the Sphingomonadaceae family ( B ). To optimize visual interpretation, the selected taxa are drawn to fill the bar graph width, but a mouse-over pop-up displays the true count of reads and relative abundance (of all taxa in the dataset, not of the subset of taxa currently displayed), the full taxonomy, and the dataset name. We have only shown the abundance and genus name here due to space considerations. We can focus in even further by looking only at taxa at less than 10% abundance in any of these datasets, still excluding Sphingomonadaceae ( C ). Or, we can look at all genera within the order Burkholderiales which appear to be the next most abundant group of taxa after Sphingomonadaceae ( D ).