Dataset and Scripts for the article: "Estimation of Carbon Use Efficiency by the 18O method: the incidence of microbial turnover assessment"

This dataset and scripts correspond to the experiments carried on the article titled "Estimation of Carbon Use Efficiency by the 18O method: the incidence of microbial turnover assessment". We investigated four aspects of the 18O method for the estimation of microbial carbon use efficiency (CUE) that vary in literature. Briefly, this method consists on incubating soil with 18O-H2O and the estimating microbial growth by measuring of the incorporation of 18O to DNA. Specifically, we 1) Assessed the sensitivity of CUE to the different measurements needed for its calculation; 2) Simulated the number of replicas needed to detect CUE increases in various soils; 3) Evaluated the potential impacts of the effects of the two most used DNA extraction kits of the CUE values; and 4) Investigated the risks associated with spiking DNA extracts with different salmon DNA quantities. Each of these questions was adressed in an experiment, numered 1-4. Here we provide open access to the data and the R scripts used to obtain the main results. Experiment 2 has no data as it is fully simulated. Each excel file contains a "Codebook" with the variable list, description and units. See the manuscript for the background and details about how data were collected.