Resolving microbial membership using Abundance and Variability In Taxonomy ( ‘AVIT )

Development of NGS has revolutionized the analysis in microbial ecology contributing to our deeper understanding of microbiota in health and disease. However, the quality , quantity and confidence of summarized taxonomic abundances are in need of further scrutiny due to sample dependent and independent effects. In this article we introduce ‘AVIT ( Abundance and Variability In Taxonomy ), an unbiased method to enrich for assigned members of microbial communities. As opposed to using a priori thresholds , ‘AVIT uses inherent abundance and variability of taxa in a dataset to determine the inclusion or rejection of each taxa for further downstream analysis. Using in-vitro and in-vivo studies, we benchmarked performance and parameterized ‘AVIT to establish a framework for investigating the dynamic range of microbial community membership in clinically relevant scenarios.