World Map

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Microbial Cartographies is an interactive world map of EMP samples showing the position of each EMP sample on Earth, connected to its most similar other sample in the EMP. The connecting line is colored by sample type if the two samples have the same type, or is gray if the two samples are of different types.
Phylogenetic similarity is weakly correlated to geographical proximity. When we compare the UniFrac distance of only the closest pairs of samples to their geographical distance, we find a weak and statistically significant correlation between the samples (R = 0.08, p < 0.001). Showing that for the sampled environments physical proximity is faintly associated with similar microbial compositions, if this pattern was more dominant we would not observe the edges going across the globe in the microbial map. Of note, these edges are observed between samples of distinct environments, and samples of the same environment (according to the empo_3 category).
A notebook with this analysis and conclusion can be found here:
https://github.com/ElDeveloper/cogs220/blob/master/distances.ipynb