Jonathan A. Eisen edited Results.md  over 8 years ago

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##Overall taxonomic diversity of ISS surfaces and comparison to previous high-throughput 16SrRNA study  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, (_Corneybacterium_, _Propionibacterium_, _Staphylococcus_,  and Streptococcus), _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 Orders found in our study, representing 93.8% of the data (Figure PieChart), are predominately comprised of human-associated organisms (Table habitat). This is not surprising, as the only source of microbial influx is via occasional crew and cargo deliveries onboard spacecraft that have been stringently cleaned to avoid microbial contamination.