The reliability and stability of these methods were described by Wu et al. 27 Illumina tag sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene V4 -
V5 hypervariable region was performed at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, using established methods.28, 29
Details of sequencing methods, quality control and filtering, and statistical
modeling are presented in the eAppendix in the Supplement.
Deciding on whether the
models are «poor» however, depends upon how much trust can be put on
details of the data — and as we have seen, there are a number of still outstanding issues (RSS vs. S+C
v5.2 for instance) that mean that these data do not lend support to the idea that the
models are poor.