home .Featured, Methods and Tools Important paper for those doing PCR based microbiome studies on challenges in correcting for rRNA gene copy numbers

Important paper for those doing PCR based microbiome studies on challenges in correcting for rRNA gene copy numbers

This is definitely worth a look

Correcting for 16S rRNA gene copy numbers in microbiome surveys remains an unsolved problem.  Stilianos Louca, Michael Doebeli and Laura Wegener Parfrey. 

The 16S ribosomal RNA gene is the most widely used marker gene in microbial ecology. Counts of 16S sequence variants, often in PCR amplicons, are used to estimate proportions of bacterial and archaeal taxa in microbial communities. Because different organisms contain different 16S gene copy numbers (GCNs), sequence variant counts are biased towards clades with greater GCNs. Several tools have recently been developed for predicting GCNs using phylogenetic methods and based on sequenced genomes, in order to correct for these biases. However, the accuracy of those predictions has not been independently assessed. Here, we systematically evaluate the predictability of 16S GCNs across bacterial and archaeal clades, based on  6,800 public sequenced genomes and using several phylogenetic methods. Further, we assess the accuracy of GCNs predicted by three recently published tools (PICRUSt, CopyRighter, and PAPRICA) over a wide range of taxa and for 635 microbial communities from varied environments. We find that regardless of the phylogenetic method tested, 16S GCNs could only be accurately predicted for a limited fraction of taxa, namely taxa with closely to moderately related representatives (15% divergence in the 16S rRNA gene). Consistent with this observation, we find that all considered tools exhibit low predictive accuracy when evaluated against completely sequenced genomes, in some cases explaining less than 10% of the variance. Substantial disagreement was also observed between tools (R2<0.5) for the majority of tested microbial communities. The nearest sequenced taxon index (NSTI) of microbial communities, i.e., the average distance to a sequenced genome, was a strong predictor for the agreement between GCN prediction tools on non-animal-associated samples, but only a moderate predictor for animal-associated samples. We recommend against correcting for 16S GCNs in microbiome surveys by default, unless OTUs are sufficiently closely related to sequenced genomes or unless a need for true OTU proportions warrants the additional noise introduced, so that community profiles remain interpretable and comparable between studies.

I note – one thing not really discussed in the paper is – there is a way around this issue – metagenomics and the use of single copy genes or genes that have low variance in copy number.  See for example

Wu D, Jospin G, Eisen JA (2013) Systematic Identification of Gene Families for Use as “Markers” for Phylogenetic and Phylogeny-Driven Ecological Studies of Bacteria and Archaea and Their Major Subgroups. PLoS ONE 8(10): e77033. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0077033

So perhaps this paper would be better titled “Correcting for 16S rRNA gene copy numbers in PCR based microbiome surveys remains an unsolved problem.”. or something like that.  But regardless, for PCR studies this is a really really important issue.

 

 

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: