Thursday, 31 March 2016

A new Operational Taxonomic Unit* for Cullalue - Tephrina betulae

On the fallen leaves of birch. Also T.populina on the fallen aspen leaves this morning

*Operational taxonomic unit
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In phylogeny an operational taxonomic unit (OTU) is an operational definition of a species or group of species often used when only DNA sequence data is available.[1] It is the most commonly used microbial diversity unit.

The definition given by NCBI is:

"Taxonomic level of sampling selected by the user to be used in a study, such as individuals, populations, species, genera, or bacterial strains."

Another definition:

"Operational taxonomic unit, species distinction in microbiology. Typically using rRNA and a percent similarity threshold for classifying microbes within the same, or different, OTUs"

The number of OTUs defined may be inflated due to errors in DNA sequencing.

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