unifrac: Unweighted UniFrac distance between communities
Description
Calculates unweighted UniFrac, a phylogenetic beta diversity metric of the the unique (non-shared) fraction of total phylogenetic diversity (branch-length) between two communities.
Usage
unifrac(comm, tree)
Arguments
comm
Community data matrix
tree
Object of class phylo - a rooted phylogeny
Value
A dist object of the unweighted UniFrac distances between communities (the unique (non-shared) fraction of total phylogenetic diversity (branch-length) between two communities).
Warning
The UniFrac distance between samples will include the branch length connecting taxa in those samples and the root of the supplied tree. The root of the supplied tree may not be spanned by any taxa in the sample. If you want the root of your tree to correspond to the most recent ancestor of the taxa actually present in your samples, you should prune the tree before running unifrac:
prunedTree <- prune.sample(sample,tree)
References
Lozupone, C., Hamady, M., and Knight, R. 2006. UniFrac - an online tool for comparing microbial community diversity in a phylogenetic context. BMC Bioinformatics 7:371.