Quantifying compositional variability in microbial communities with FAVA.

ABSTRACT: Microbial communities vary across space, time, and individual hosts, presenting new challenges for the development of statistics measuring the variability of community composition. To understand differences across microbiome samples from different host individuals, sampling times, spatial locations, or experimental replicates, we present FAVA, a new normalized measure for characterizing compositional variability across multiple microbiome samples. FAVA quantifies variability across many samples of taxonomic or functional relative abundances in a single index ranging between 0 and 1, equaling 0 when all samples are identical and equaling 1 when each sample is entirely comprised of a single taxon. Its definition relies on the population-genetic statistic FST , with samples playing the role o

SUBMITTER: Morrison ML 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11244974 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature