Can Theory Improve the Scope of Quantitative Metazoan Metabarcoding?
by
John P. Wares 1,*,† and
Paula Pappalardo 2,†
John P. Wares 1,*,† and
Paula Pappalardo 2,†
1
Department of Genetics and Odum School of Ecology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA
2
Odum School of Ecology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
†
These authors contributed equally to this work.
Academic Editor: Michael Wink
Diversity 2016, 8(1), 1; https://doi.org/10.3390/d8010001
Received: 2 November 2015 / Revised: 21 December 2015 / Accepted: 22 December 2015 / Published: 29 December 2015
(This article belongs to the Special Issue DNA Barcoding and Biodiversity Research)
Using high-throughput sequencing approaches to quantify biodiversity has a number of hurdles, in particular that the number of reads for a given taxon may not be proportional to the number of individuals of that taxon in a sample. Here, we consider whether summary statistics generated in the course of population genetic analyses (such as estimates of haplotype diversity and mutation rate) may be useful in reverse inference of the number of individuals input to an assay. Although our results show that these statistics—combined with the observed number of segregating sites and number of haplotypes in the assay—may be informative, there remain significant concerns about the ability to “metabarcode” a sample and infer relative species abundance.
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Keywords:
biodiversity; species diversity; population genetics; summary statistics; coalescent theory; metabarcoding
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Wares, J.P.; Pappalardo, P. Can Theory Improve the Scope of Quantitative Metazoan Metabarcoding? Diversity 2016, 8, 1.
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