A robust, but forgotten, technique to study microbial communities

What is it about?

Taxonomic and functional annotation studies of metagenomic reads are nowadays more on trend. Phylogenetic diversity analysis, on the contrary, got more out of fashion, hence less microbiome studies use it nowadays to study microbial communities. However, the study of microbial communities is heavily hindered by its compositional nature, and while taxonomic and functional annotation tend to suffer more from compositionality's drawbacks, phylogenetic diversity analysis is more robust to it. So, we pulled PD out of the drawer, and used it to analyze our dataset. We found signals of aging, piglets' intrinsic factors such as day of birth, breed, and litter effects, and mild effects of intramuscularly administered antibiotic, and oral probiotic, on the gut microbiome of post-weaning piglets.

Featured Image

Photo by Forest Simon on Unsplash

Photo by Forest Simon on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Our study is important because it's a reminder to the scientific community of the strength of phylogenetic diversity analysis to study microbial communities. From a biological signal perspective, our study is a reminder of host intrinsic factors as confounding factors to the sought signal.

Perspectives