Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Extensive Phylogenetic Analysis Of A Soil Bacterial Community Illustrates Extreme Taxon Evenness And The Effects Of Amplicon Length, Degree Of Coverage, And Dna Fractionation On Classification And Ecological Parameters, Sergio E. Morales, Theodore F. Cosart, Jesse Johnson, William Holben

Computer Science Faculty Publications

To thoroughly investigate the bacterial community diversity present in a single composite sample from an agricultural soil and to examine potential biases resulting from data acquisition and analytical approaches, we examined the effects of percent G+C DNA fractionation, sequence length, and degree of coverage of bacterial diversity on several commonly used ecological parameters (species estimation, diversity indices, and evenness). We also examined variation in phylogenetic placement based on multiple commonly used approaches (ARB alignments and multiple RDP tools). The results demonstrate that this soil bacterial community is highly diverse, with 1,714 operational taxonomic units demonstrated and 3,555 estimated (based on …