1. Putative MBTA microbial community sources.
Putative MBTA microbial community sources. (Ai) Ordination of subway surface data jointly with human skin (anterior nares), oral (mixed sites from within oral cavity), and gut (stool) microbiome data from the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) (12). Principal coordinate analysis was performed with weighted UniFrac distance and calculated using OTU relative abundances. (Aii to vi) Correlations between subway samples and human body sites (19), including skin (ii), oral (iii), and gut (iv) samples, as well as environmental sites, i.e., air (20) (v) and soil (21) (vi) samples. The x and y axes represent mean relative abundance levels across each data set with standard error bars. For each plot, subway samples (MBTA) are represented on the x axis and potential source community samples are represented on the y axis. (B and C) Microbial SourceTracker (22) was used to identify possible human and environmental sources of subway (B) train and (C) station communities. The relative estimated contribution of each source is plotted per subway sample.
Tiffany Hsu et al. mSystems 2016; doi: /mSystems