Gradient Internal Standard Method for Absolute Quantification of Microbial Amplicon Sequencing Data

ABSTRACT High-throughput amplicon sequencing is a critical tool for studying microbiota; however, it results only in relative abundance data. Thus, changes in absolute abundance of microbiota cannot be determined, which hinders further microbiology research. We have therefore established a gradient internal standard absolute quantification (GIS-AQ) method to overcome this issue, which can simultaneously obtain the absolute abundances of bacteria and fungi. Deviations from the quantitative equations of microbes and internal standards were eliminated through calibration. Compared with traditional quantitative real-time PCR and microscopy quantifications, this method is reliable (R2average = 0.998; P  0.05). The GIS-AQ method can be adapted to any amplicon primer choice (e.g., 336F/806R and ITS3/ITS4), rendering it applicable to ecosystem studies including food, soil, and water samples. Crucially, when using solid-state fermentation samples from various temporal dimensions, the results obtained from the relative and absolute abundance are different. The absolute abundance can be used to study the difference in communities between different samples, and the GIS-AQ method allows this to be done rapidly. Therefore, combining the absolute abundance with relative abundance can accurately reflect the microbiota composition. IMPORTANCE To solve the problem of amplicon sequencing cannot discern the microbiota absolute abundance, we proposed a gradient internal standard absolute quantification method. We used Chinese liquor fermentation as a model system to demonstrate the reliability and accuracy of the method. By comparing the relative and absolute abundances of microbiota in various temporal dimensions, we found dynamic changes in the absolute abundance of communities under various temporal dimensions from the relative abundance. Based on its design principle, this method can be widely applied to different ecosystems. Therefore, we believe that the GIS-AQ method can play an immeasurably useful role in microbiological research.