Fig. 6: Reintegrating ecological information into OTU delimitation.
From: Community conservatism is widespread across microbial phyla and environments
a, Each grey dot denotes a hypothetical pair of lineages (strains). The classical assignment of lineages into OTUs takes only sequence similarity into account (usually, 16S rRNA similarity or ANI). b, A hypothetical classification of lineages based only on ecological niche similarity. c, We propose a combination of both as a more realistic system: reintegrating ecological information (such as community conservatism) into OTU clustering, considering both sequence similarity and ecological information when forming ecologically informed OTUs (eOTUs) using a multiphased clustering approach.
