Summaries of microbiome data were calculated from 100 simulated samples containing different mixtures of 1,000 references.

Only reference sequences with frequencies >0.1% were used to calculate the statistics. In each sample the absolute value of the difference between the actual statistic and that estimated by Karp, Kallisto, and UCLUST was calculated. The group-wise Beta Diversity value was a single estimate from all 100 samples; it is not an average and therefore there is no standard error.