More recently, a re-evaluation of a longitudinal study aimed at exploring succession in microbial communities within an infant (for the original study, see [24]) was performed using the HMP as context [31]. While the original work showed a distinct increase in the diversity of the infant’s fecal community through the first few years of life, putting its results in context immediately clarified the trajectory of succession by showing that the microbiome moved from resembling a vaginal community (which makes sense given the mode of birth, see [51] for a study on the effects of delivery mode on the infant microbiome) to resembling a fecal community. Visualizing longitudinal microbiome studies as animations (see [52] for a movie of the re-evaluation of the aforementioned infant longitudinal data), particularly in the context of a reference, has been so useful that the ability was recently added into EMPeror [53], a common visualization tool for ordination plots generated from microbiome data.
