Profiling true microbial community of newborn beef calves using low microbial biomass samples

The goals of this study were to (1) optimize the denoising parameters in the QIIME2 bioinformatics pipeline to increase the accuracy of microbial community profiling in low microbial biomass samples, (2) assess the impact of genetic materials (DNA vs. RNA) on microbial profiles generated from low microbial biomass samples, and (3) assess the impact of hypervariable regions of the 16S rRNA gene (V1V3 vs. V3V4) on oral and fecal microbial communities of newborn beef calves (Chapter 3).