The first 15 most abundant fungal OTUs in fresh leaf, raw and ripened Pu-erh samples.

<p>The first 15 most abundant fungal OTUs in fresh leaf, raw and ripened Pu-erh samples.</p

Detection of toxic metabolites in raw and ripened Pu-erh samples.

<p>Raw Pu-erh samples are indicated by circles, and ripened samples by squares. Mean concentrations and standard deviations of each metabolite in raw (in blue) and ripened (in orange) Pu-erh samples are marked.</p

Number of indicator fungal/bacterial OTUs detected for fresh leaf, raw and ripened Pu-erh samples.

<p>Number of indicator fungal/bacterial OTUs detected for fresh leaf, raw and ripened Pu-erh samples.</p

PCoA of Binary-Jaccard dissimilarities of microbial communities of fresh tea leaf (red), raw (blue) and ripened (orange) Pu-erh samples.

<p>The oldest raw Pu-erh sample (A6, 28 years old), indicated by an arrow in both PCoA analyses, is more similar to ripened Pu-erh than to other raw Pu-erh samples.</p

Comparison among fresh leaf, raw Pu-erh and ripened Pu-erh samples at β-diversity level.

<p>Comparison among fresh leaf, raw Pu-erh and ripened Pu-erh samples at β-diversity level.</p

OTU overlap among fresh tea leaves (red), raw (blue) and ripened (orange) Pu-erh tea samples.

<p>Venn diagrams illustrate the number of unique and shared fungal (a, c) and bacterial (b, d) OTUs. We compared both the total OTUs (a, b) and just the first 100 most abundant OTUs (c, d) in the fungal/bacterial datasets.</p

Rarefaction-based comparison of fresh tea leaf (red), raw (blue) and ripened (orange) Pu-erh samples with regard to fungal (a) and bacterial (b) richness.

<p>Fungi were rarefied at 39 507 sequences to keep all samples, while bacteria at 1103 sequences to exclude three fresh leaf samples (LN2, LS2, and LS4) and three raw Pu-erh samples (A3, A14, and A15).</p