arising from: G. Piton et al. Nat. Microbiol. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-023-01465-0 (2023).

Estimating life history traits of bacterial communities from metagenomes is an increasingly common practice in microbial ecology research^1,2,3,4. Contributing to this area of inquiry, Piton et al.⁵ use a global dataset of soil metagenomes to describe life history trait dimensions of soil bacteria. Our analysis of the same dataset suggests that the genome size analysis of Piton et al. may underestimate potential biases introduced by varying proportions of non-bacterial DNA among different ecosystem types. We demonstrate how this potential bias could influence the relationships of this trait with environmental variables, thus altering the interpretation of the identified trait dimensions.

源自：G. Piton 等人。纳特。微生物。 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-023-01465-0（2023）。

从宏基因组估计细菌群落的生活史特征是微生物生态学研究中越来越常见的做法^1,2,3,4。 Piton 等人为这一领域的研究做出了贡献。⁵使用土壤宏基因组的全球数据集来描述土壤细菌的生活史特征维度。我们对同一数据集的分析表明 Piton 等人的基因组大小分析。可能会低估不同生态系统类型中不同比例的非细菌 DNA 带来的潜在偏差。我们证明了这种潜在的偏见如何影响该性状与环境变量的关系，从而改变对已识别的性状维度的解释。