Incorporating 16S Gene Copy Number Information Improves Estimates of Microbial Diversity and Abundance
Figure 4
Rank abundance distributions and estimated species pool richness from 100 simulations of communities of (A) 1000, (B) 10000, and (C) 50000 individual genes or organisms sampled from an underlying distribution of abundances (P(N)) and genes (P(G)).
For each simulation, a distribution of organismal abundances (P(N); black) and resulting gene abundances (P(G); red) was generated for 5000 species following the methods described in the caption for Figure 3. Rank-abundance distributions are presented for a single randomly chosen simulation at each sampling intensity. For each simulation, we estimated the number of species S in the species pool using a parametric method [22], [23], with the true S = 5000. Estimates of species pool size were significantly higher and closer to the true value based on N versus G at all sampling intensities (ANOVA; P<0.01).