Jenna M. Lang edited Results.md  about 9 years ago

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After filtering chimeric and eukaryotic sequences from the data, the number of sequences per surface sampled ranged from 26,221 - 76,656. Open-reference clustering at 97% similarity resulted in 12,554 OTUs (OTU is a proxy for microbial "species".) This exceeds the number of species observed by Venkateswaran at al 2014, which is not surprising, given the increased sampling depth in this study (~1 million versus ~ 50,000 high-quality sequences.) Our study also observed 3 notable, qualitative differences from the Venkateswaran at al 2014. First, in their study, more than 90% of all sequences were assigned to 4 bacterial genera (Corneybacterium, Propionibacterium, Staphylococcus, and Streptococcus), while in our study, they comprised only 24% of the data (9.6%, 0.05%, 10.7%, and 3.6%, respectively). Second, they found no evidence of Archaea in their samples, even when interrogating with Archaeal-specific primers, but we did find evidence for a very low-abundance archaeal presence (2335 sequences, from 3 archaeal phyla). Finally, despite the fact that they were able to culture many spore-forming organisms from their samples, they observed no sequence data from spore-forming organisms. However, we found a large percentage of sequences from spore-forming organisms (20.9% Bacilli and 9.6% Clostridia) in our data. These differences are most likely due to differences in PCR primers, DNA extraction method, and sequencing depth.  The 19 most abundant Families found in our study, comprising 93.8% of the data (Figure PieChart), are predominately human-associated organisms, commonly found on skin . \cite{Grice_2009}.