Relative abundance and Sequence abundance order not equal

[ericvdtoorn]

Hello Jim, and congratulations on the Nature paper!

We've been using Sylph on some samples, and like the results. One oddity I came across recently is some samples where the the relative abundance was higher for a genus while its sequence abundance was lower. Does this make sense? What should I understand from this?

	clade_name	relative_abundance	sequence_abundance	ANI (if strain-level)	Coverage (if strain-level)	sample
0	d__Bacteria|p__Nitrospirota|c__Nitrospiria|o__...	5.1931	1.769	NA	NA	AT2
1	d__Bacteria|p__Chloroflexota|c__Anaerolineae|o...	5.1080	1.840	NA	NA	AT2

[bluenote-1577]

@ericvdtoorn sorry for the late response. Please see https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8184642/ for more information about this. Relative abundance is related to coverage; sequence abundance is related to the # of nucleotides covered. Larger genomes will have "more" sequence abundance relative to smaller genomes.

[ericvdtoorn]

I see, thank you!