Metagenome of the final synthetic community
Bacterial colonies were tooth-picked into a 2 ml centrifuge tube for each community containing sterilized water, then proteinase K and lysozyme (both from Sigma-Aldrich, St. Louis Missouri, United States) were added for an initial lysis (37C, 30 min). Then the tubes  were centrifuged and the pellets were used as the source for DNA extraction with the MoBio PowerSoil extraction kit.