UniFrac: an effective distance metric for microbial community comparison

Abstract

UniFrac is a β-diversity measure that uses phylogenetic information to compare environmental samples. UniFrac, coupled with standard multivariate statistical techniques including principal coordinates analysis (PCoA), identifies factors explaining differences among microbial communities. A recent simulation study concluded that UniFrac is unsuitable as a distance metric and should not be used for multivariate analysis (Schloss, 2008). We counter this argument by reassessing the data that led to this conclusion and by providing a mathematical proof showing that UniFrac is a distance metric. However, we confirm with actual sequence data that UniFrac values can be influenced by the number of sequences/sample, and recommend sequence jackknifing (that is, determining how often the cluster results are recovered using random subsets of the data) to avoid this issue.