Estimating Microbial Population Densities Based on Genomic Signatures

摘要

We consider the problem of estimating microbial compositions of environmental samples for applications such as environmental monitoring and microbial disease diagnosis. Identifying the members of a community and their respective proportion is a challenging problem due to the fact that the members are often dependent upon each other and thus cannot be isolated and cultivated as pure cultures in a laboratory. The available computational methods to estimate species richness and abundance are limited. We propose a simple but effective method to overcome the limitations of the existing methods based on the concept of genomic signature. A simulation study is performed and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the new algorithm.