Genstat program

For plant degradation, QPCR data, taxonomy, and COG gene abundance data, significant differences between groups was determined using one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) followed by Duncan's multiple range tests to detect significant differences between groups where appropriate (Duncan, 1955 (link)) using the GenStat program (Tenth Edition, VSN International Ltd., Hemel Hemstead, UK; Payne et al., 2007 ). Taxonomy and function based PCoA plots, function based-bar charts, heatmaps, and KEGG pathways were generated in MG-RAST. T-test were conducted within MG-RAST using level 2 COG based bar chart data in order to compare differences in gene abundances for the broad classifications within primary and secondary colonization events. FT-IR spectra were converted to text files using OPUS and imported to Matlab for statistical and chemometricanalysis using Matlab (version 6.5.1) and the Matlab Statistics Toolbox (version 4, The Mathworks, Cambridge, UK). Spectra were analyzed for underlying structure correlating with incubation time by principal component analysis (PCA) (Martens and Naes, 1989 ; Mariey et al., 2001 (link); Sheng et al., 2006 (link)) and significant differences between spectra from different time points were detected using multivariate one-way analysis of variance model (MANOVA). In all instances the threshold of statistical significance was set at P < 0.05.