Fig. 1

Taxonomic profiles of whole blood samples from septic ICU patient. Septic whole blood samples collected from ICU patients clustered into three groups based on their taxonomic bacterial DNA profiles. Taxonomic profiles of whole blood samples with 500 or more sequences and clustered using weighted UniFrac (54 patients). A composite unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA) tree of all the samples was generated with the profiles ordered based on their placement in the UPGMA tree (a). Three groups of SB samples were clearly identified. Group 1 was defined by the abundance of Streptococcus in the profile, Group 2 by the abundance of Gram-negative OTUs, and Group 3 by the abundance of Staphylococcus. Blood culture results for each sample are indicated below the sample. Blood culture positive but discordant from molecular sequencing are indicated by (+), blood culture positive with concordance to sequencing by (a red +), and blood culture negative (−). Samples with a (*) are those with molecular profile results that are supported by other clinical culture data. The average taxonomic profile for the cluster groups shows the breakdown of the bacterial DNA distribution in each taxonomic cluster group (b)