Metataxonomy has become the standard for characterizing the diversity and composition of microbial communities associated with multicellular organisms and their environment. Currently available protocols for metataxonomy assume a uniform DNA extraction, amplification and sequencing efficiency for all sample types and taxa. It has been suggested that the addition of a mock community (MC) to biological samples before the DNA extraction step could aid identification of technical biases during processing and support direct comparisons of microbiota composition, but the impact of MC on diversity estimates of samples is unknown. Here, large and small aliquots of pulverized bovine fecal samples were extracted with no, low or high doses of MC, characterized using standard Illumina technology for metataxonomics, and analysed with custom bioinformatic pipelines. We demonstrated that sample diversity estimates were distorted only if MC dose was high compared to sample mass (i.e. when MC > 10% of sample reads). We also showed that MC was an informative in situ positive control, permitting an estimation of the sample 16S copy number, and detecting sample outliers. We tested this approach on a range of sample types from a terrestrial ecosystem, including rhizosphere soil, whole invertebrates, and wild vertebrate fecal samples, and discuss possible clinical applications.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 3. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 12 March 2023.
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Altmetric has tracked 25,468,708 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 43rd percentile – i.e., 43% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 141,203 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 18.7. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 55% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 3,542 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 61% of its contemporaries.
