Towards Quantitative Microbiome Community Profiling Using Internal Standards.

ABSTRACT: An inherent issue in high-throughput rRNA gene tag sequencing microbiome surveys is that they provide compositional data in relative abundances. This often leads to spurious correlations, making the interpretation of relationships to biogeochemical rates challenging. To overcome this issue, we quantitatively estimated the abundance of microorganisms by spiking in known amounts of internal DNA standards. Using a 3-year sample set of diverse microbial communities from the Western Antarctica Peninsula, we demonstrated that the internal standard method yielded community profiles and taxon cooccurrence patterns substantially different from those derived using relative abundances. We found that the method provided results consistent with the traditional CHEMTAX analysis of pigments and total bac

SUBMITTER: Lin Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6384117 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature