2.6 Bacterial community function
Phylogenetic investigation of communities by reconstructing unobserved statesĀ  (PICRUSt) has been used extensively to infer approximate microbial community functions based on amplicon sequences, although it has some limitations (Douglas et al., 2020). The sequences corresponding to each OTU were compared in the Greengenes database (http://greengenes.lbl.gov) to obtain KEGG ortholog (KO) data (DeSantis et al., 2006). Subsequently, community function richness and diversity were calculated based on the KO prediction results, and the total number of KO genes was divided by the number of OTUs to obtain the average number of KO genes in an OTU.