High-throughput sequencing of pooled samples to determine community-level microbiome diversity

摘要

Purpose: Community-level interventions in cluster randomized controlled trials may alter the gut microbiome of individuals. The current method of estimating community diversities uses microbiome data obtained from multiple individual's specimens. Here we propose randomly pooling a number of microbiome samples from the same community into one sample before sequencing to estimate community-level microbiome diversity.