Eight methods are reviewed: Hartwig-Scherer's taxon independent solution, four methods involving measurements from the weight-bearing appendicular skeleton, Ruff's method using the length of the reconstructed skeleton and an estimate of body breadth, estimates from the total skeletal mass and estimates from the body mass index when the stature is known approximately.
The average size of biomes did not show phylogenetic signal in any lineage whereas niche breadth, as estimated by number of biomes overlapping with geographic range, displayed phylogenetic signal only for the H. dentipes and Graptodytes lineages.
Gene-wise expression breadth was estimated following Yanai et al. (2005): where N is the number of tissues, x i, the expression intensity for gene x in tissue i, and xmax, the maximum expression intensity of gene x across all tissues.
Using blast algorithm, we indirectly evaluated the transcriptome coverage breadth by estimating the number of unique genes.
Finishing steps include identification and removal of overlapping sequences with resulting physical gaps replaced by a variable number of successive "N's", reflecting their estimated breadth.
Diet breadth and overlap were estimated from %IRI values.
For each accession number in the dog RefSeq database to which at least one fox read mapped, we estimated the breadth of coverage of dog transcripts by fox reads.
The spatial breadth of expression was estimated as the number of organs (minimum 1, maximum 14) where the gene expression value was larger than 75 (arbitrarily chosen as threshold to reduce false positives, see [ 40]; values ranged from 0 to 66,760, with a median of 460).
Table 2 displays GEMS serotypes in relation to the proposed quadrivalent vaccine composition (S. flexneri 2a, S. flexneri 3a, S. flexneri 6 plus S. sonnei) to estimate breadth of coverage and possible variation over time from the perspective of all 7 GEMS sites, the site with the most Shigella cases (Bangladesh), and the other 6 sites.
Breadth of gene expression was estimated as the number of organ and tissue sources of gene-specific ESTs.
We also estimated the temporal breadth of expression in leaves and flowers as the number of developmental time points in which the gene was expressed at a level larger than 75.
