AVIT

Background: We introduce AVIT Abundance and Variability In Taxonomy, an unbiased method to enrich for assigned members of microbial communities. As opposed to using a priori thresholds, AVIT uses inherent abundance and variability of taxa in a dataset to determine the inclusion or rejection of each taxa for further downstream analysis. Using in-vitro and in-vivo studies, we benchmarked performance and parameterized AVIT to establish a framework for investigating the dynamic range of microbial community membership in clinically relevant scenarios. Objective: Noise reduction and resolution in microbiome studies accounting for variability and abundance.