Interpretation of gene abundance data

[Anastasia A. Zabolotneva]

Hello

Could you please help me to interpret the data obtained in Picrust analysis?

I made Picrust for microbiota metagenome sequencing data in several series of experiment (for example, for several groups of mice containing 10 mice in each group). Thus, I get data for microbial gene abundance in every group. I concider that the abundance of conservative genes such as DNA polymerase should be quite similar in a group of species, but it varies significantly, for example, from 90,000 to 600,000. Does it mean that I need to normalize all the data according to the abundance of such concervative genes?

Thank you very much for answering!

[Robyn Wright]

Hi,

I'm not quite sure which abundances you're referring to - the abundance of a specific gene will vary depending on the total abundance within each sample. I would recommend normalising the counts within each sample, for example converting them to relative abundance. You can see some suggestions for further analysis here.

Robyn