L5 Statistical Analysis of Microbial Data

Question 1

What are the key diversity metrics used in microbial ecology?

Answer 1

Alpha - Diversity within a sample

Beta - Diversity between samples (Some measure of distance, always a distance!)

Question 2

How can we classify the different diversity metrics?

Answer 2

Quantitative (abundance) vs. Qualitative (e.g. presence or absence)

and

Phylogenetic (account for evolutionary relationships between sequence variants) vs. Non-phylogenetic (treat all as equally related)

Question 3

What is evenness?

Answer 3

How even the distribution of taxa is within a sample