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      Waste Not, Want Not: Why Rarefying Microbiome Data Is Inadmissible

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      PLoS Computational Biology
      Public Library of Science

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          Abstract

          Current practice in the normalization of microbiome count data is inefficient in the statistical sense. For apparently historical reasons, the common approach is either to use simple proportions (which does not address heteroscedasticity) or to use rarefying of counts, even though both of these approaches are inappropriate for detection of differentially abundant species. Well-established statistical theory is available that simultaneously accounts for library size differences and biological variability using an appropriate mixture model. Moreover, specific implementations for DNA sequencing read count data (based on a Negative Binomial model for instance) are already available in RNA-Seq focused R packages such as edgeR and DESeq. Here we summarize the supporting statistical theory and use simulations and empirical data to demonstrate substantial improvements provided by a relevant mixture model framework over simple proportions or rarefying. We show how both proportions and rarefied counts result in a high rate of false positives in tests for species that are differentially abundant across sample classes. Regarding microbiome sample-wise clustering, we also show that the rarefying procedure often discards samples that can be accurately clustered by alternative methods. We further compare different Negative Binomial methods with a recently-described zero-inflated Gaussian mixture, implemented in a package called metagenomeSeq. We find that metagenomeSeq performs well when there is an adequate number of biological replicates, but it nevertheless tends toward a higher false positive rate. Based on these results and well-established statistical theory, we advocate that investigators avoid rarefying altogether. We have provided microbiome-specific extensions to these tools in the R package, phyloseq.

          Author Summary

          The term microbiome refers to the ecosystem of microbes that live in a defined environment. The decreasing cost and increasing speed of DNA sequencing technology has recently provided scientists with affordable and timely access to the genes and genomes of microbiomes that inhabit our planet and even our own bodies. In these investigations many microbiome samples are sequenced at the same time on the same DNA sequencing machine, but often result in total numbers of sequences per sample that are vastly different. The common procedure for addressing this difference in sequencing effort across samples – different library sizes – is to either (1) base analyses on the proportional abundance of each species in a library, or (2) rarefy, throw away sequences from the larger libraries so that all have the same, smallest size. We show that both of these normalization methods can work when comparing obviously-different whole microbiomes, but that neither method works well when comparing the relative proportions of each bacterial species across microbiome samples. We show that alternative methods based on a statistical mixture model perform much better and can be easily adapted from a separate biological sub-discipline, called RNA-Seq analysis.

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          Most cited references31

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          Quantifying biodiversity: procedures and pitfalls in the measurement and comparison of species richness

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            Small-sample estimation of negative binomial dispersion, with applications to SAGE data.

            We derive a quantile-adjusted conditional maximum likelihood estimator for the dispersion parameter of the negative binomial distribution and compare its performance, in terms of bias, to various other methods. Our estimation scheme outperforms all other methods in very small samples, typical of those from serial analysis of gene expression studies, the motivating data for this study. The impact of dispersion estimation on hypothesis testing is studied. We derive an "exact" test that outperforms the standard approximate asymptotic tests.
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              Error-correcting barcoded primers for pyrosequencing hundreds of samples in multiplex.

              We constructed error-correcting DNA barcodes that allow one run of a massively parallel pyrosequencer to process up to 1,544 samples simultaneously. Using these barcodes we processed bacterial 16S rRNA gene sequences representing microbial communities in 286 environmental samples, corrected 92% of sample assignment errors, and thus characterized nearly as many 16S rRNA genes as have been sequenced to date by Sanger sequencing.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS Comput Biol
                PLoS Comput. Biol
                plos
                ploscomp
                PLoS Computational Biology
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )
                1553-734X
                1553-7358
                April 2014
                3 April 2014
                : 10
                : 4
                : e1003531
                Affiliations
                [1]Statistics Department, Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America
                Heinrich Heine University, Germany
                Author notes

                The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                Conceived and designed the experiments: PJM SH. Performed the experiments: PJM. Analyzed the data: PJM SH. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: PJM SH. Wrote the paper: PJM SH.

                Article
                PCOMPBIOL-D-13-01815
                10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003531
                3974642
                24699258
                bfd2b0da-811a-4515-ab5e-8e589de8f0b7
                Copyright @ 2014

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 18 October 2013
                : 3 February 2014
                Page count
                Pages: 12
                Funding
                This work was supported by the NIH ( http://www.nih.gov) under grant number NIH R01-GM086884. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
                Categories
                Research Article
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Ecology
                Microbial Ecology
                Microbiology
                Medical Microbiology
                Physical Sciences
                Mathematics
                Statistics (Mathematics)
                Biostatistics
                Contingency Tables
                Statistical Methods

                Quantitative & Systems biology
                Quantitative & Systems biology

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