Advantages of meta-total RNA sequencing (MeTRS) over shotgun metagenomics and amplicon-based sequencing in the profiling of complex microbial communities

Performance comparison of microbiome profiling methods on Latin square spike-in data set. Relative abundances of yeast (C. albicans, S. cerevisiae, S. pombe) and bacteria (E. coli, L. rhamnosus, P. acnes) species are plotted as a function of the number of cells that were spiked into the background stool homogenate prior to DNA or RNA extraction (a, c, e and g). Relative abundances in the background sample were then subtracted from all other samples (b, d, f and h