title: Expanding the UniFrac Toolbox.
abstract: The UniFrac distance metric is often used to separate groups in microbiome analysis, but requires a constant sequencing depth to work properly. Here we demonstrate that unweighted UniFrac is highly sensitive to rarefaction instance and to sequencing depth in uniform data sets with no clear structure or separation between groups. We show that this arises because of subcompositional effects. We introduce information UniFrac and ratio UniFrac, two new weightings that are not as sensitive to rarefaction and allow greater separation of outliers than classic unweighted and weighted UniFrac. With this expansion of the UniFrac toolbox, we hope to empower researchers to extract more varied information from their data.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biochemistry, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: Ruth G
authors.initials: RG
authors.lastname: Wong
authors.affiliation: Department of Biochemistry, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: Jia R
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: Department of Biochemistry, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: Gregory B
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5803-3380
authors.initials: GB
authors.lastname: Gloor
mesh_terms: D001419:Bacteria / Q000145:classification / Q000235:genetics; D006801:Humans; D064307:Microbiota; D010802:Phylogeny; D012336:RNA, Ribosomal, 16S / Q000235:genetics
chemical_list: D012336:RNA, Ribosomal, 16S