Abundance-weighted phylogenetic diversity measures distinguish microbial community states and are robust to sampling depth.

ABSTRACT: In microbial ecology studies, the most commonly used ways of investigating alpha (within-sample) diversity are either to apply non-phylogenetic measures such as Simpson's index to Operational Taxonomic Unit (OTU) groupings, or to use classical phylogenetic diversity (PD), which is not abundance-weighted. Although alpha diversity measures that use abundance information in a phylogenetic framework do exist, they are not widely used within the microbial ecology community. The performance of abundance-weighted phylogenetic diversity measures compared to classical discrete measures has not been explored, and the behavior of these measures under rarefaction (sub-sampling) is not yet clear. In this paper we compare the ability of various alpha diversity measures to distinguish between different c

SUBMITTER: McCoy CO 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3775626 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature