A Statistical Perspective on the Challenges in Molecular Microbial Biology.

ABSTRACT: High throughput sequencing (HTS)-based technology enables identifying and quantifying non-culturable microbial organisms in all environments. Microbial sequences have enhanced our understanding of the human microbiome, the soil and plant environment, and the marine environment. All molecular microbial data pose statistical challenges due to contamination sequences from reagents, batch effects, unequal sampling, and undetected taxa. Technical biases and heteroscedasticity have the strongest effects, but different strains across subjects and environments also make direct differential abundance testing unwieldy. We provide an introduction to a few statistical tools that can overcome some of these difficulties and demonstrate those tools on an example. We show how standard statistical methods,

SUBMITTER: Jeganathan P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9667415 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature