Fig. 5

Detection of low abundance contaminants varied among bioinformatic processing programs. Contaminants were found primarily in mothur processed data and could largely be traced back to samples corresponding to the V3-V4 primer set or to negative controls. Data shown represent total read abundance for all inexact sequence variants collapsed into a consensus sequence within 15% distance. Consensus sequences were considered mismatches were if they clustered with a 16S rRNA sequence from the mock community. White heatmap cells indicate the consensus sequence was not represented among the corresponding data. The dendrogram represents a UPGMA tree constructed from the distances among consensus sequences