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Supporting information
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for
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Identifying the core microbial community in the gut of fungus-growing
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termites
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Saria Otani, Aram Mikaelyan, Tânia Nobre, Lars H. Hansen, N’Golo A. Koné, Søren J.
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Sørensen, Duur K. Aanen, Jacobus J. Boomsma, Andreas Brune and Michael Poulsen
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Table S1: Relative abundance of the sequences identified and their taxonomic placement (to
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genus level) for all taxa identified, the interactive table allows to display classification results
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for different taxonomic levels (3: phylum; 4: class; 5: order; 6: family; 7: genus) (Excel file:
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Otani_TableS1.xlsx).
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Table S2: Phylotype contributions to differences between termite gut communities observed
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in the PCA analyses (Figure 2, main paper). Estimates of principal components PC1-PC9 in
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total, sequence abundances, and taxonomic levels (to genus level) are presented for all taxa
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identified (Excel file: Otani_TableS2.xlsx).
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Table S3: The number of phylotypes shared (top) and proportions of communities shared
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(bottom) in all possible combinations for the nine communities.
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Ta Table S4: Two-sample t-test analyses of the relative abundances of taxa assigned to the
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seven bacterial phyla in fungus-growing termites (this study), cockroaches, lower and higher
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non-fungus-growing termites (Dietrich et al. 2014). Only reads classified to the genus- or sub1
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genus levels were included. Fisher tests of combined p-values in each combination in the
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bottom. FGT: fungus-growing termites, HT: higher non-fungus-growing termites, LT: lower
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termites; significant p-values after Bonferroni correction in bold.
Bacterial Phyla
Spirochaetes
TG3
Elusimicrobia
Firmicutes
Bacteroidetes
Synergistetes
Proteobacteria
combined p-values
FGT - HT
t value
3.96
2.99
2.14
0.5
3.26
2.79
4.56
df
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8
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adjusted p-value
0.39
0.501
1
1
0.02
0.01
0.1
0.03551619
FGT - LT
t value
3.78
0.82
4.69
3.97
2.87
5.14
0.25
df
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15
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9
14
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adjusted p-value
0.002
1
0.03
0.008
0.83
0.01
1
0.000408351
FGT-cockroaches
t value
1.03
0.04
4.91
2.64
0.9
3.57
2.09
df
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adjusted p-value
0.062
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0.006
1
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0.23
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0.175421
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Fig. S1: Rarefaction curves of sequence depth generated with R (R Core Team 2013). The
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curves represent the nine analysed termite gut samples, and each curve shows the number of
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identified phylotypes as a function of the number of sequenced reads after filtering.
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Fig. S2: PCoA plots for pairwise combinations of the first three principal components
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visualising community dissimilarities (Unifrac analysis). The proportion of variation
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explained is displayed in the axis labels.
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Fig. S3: PCoA (top) and NMDS (bottom) plots of Bray-Curtis distances between
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communities including high-filtered and classified reads, after running classification-based
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analysis.
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Fig. S4: PCoA and NMDS plots of Bray-Curtis distances between communities including all
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high-filtered reads (including the unclassified), after running an OTU-cluster analysis at 97%
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sequence similarity.
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