The performance metrics used were taxonomic accuracy and agreement between the morphological and molecular species richness estimation.
And as researchers have delved deeper, particularly since adding DNA sequencing to their toolkit in the 1970s (which makes it relatively easy to identify individual species and to catalogue their genetic and molecular capabilities), the richness and complexity of those relationships has produced surprise after surprise.
Epidemiological analyses of these and other risk factors are ongoing, exploiting the richness of molecular data and the integrative approach described above.
The high extraction yield obtained from FPR could be due to the richness in high molecular weight polysaccharide as reported by Taie et al. [28].
The congruence of morphological and molecular methods on assessing species richness (total number of morphospecies or MOTUs per transect respectively) and species density (mean number of morphospecies or MOTUs respectively found in each pitfall trap on transects) was compared by paired t-tests.
Molecular methods for quantifying species richness typically exceed estimates made via morphology alone, because molecular methods both reveal cryptic species and permit inclusion of specimens that would otherwise remain unidentified [ 1, 22].
It is therefore unable to incorporate two key aspects of modern molecular knowledge: first is the richness of genomic variation, so much more complicated than simple mutation, and second is the opaque relationship between the genotype and its resulting phenotype.
This may also explain the patterns in a study on angiosperms that investigated the correlations between species-richness, the rate of molecular evolution, and three energy variables (temperature, UV light, and evapotransportation), but which found no support for the mutation rate as the direct mediator of species-richness [ 21].
Microbiomes were discovered largely through advances in molecular genetics, which have revealed a hidden richness of microbial diversity on the planet.
Since then, the rapid development of molecular methods has revealed an even greater richness of microbes, with as many as 104 106 bacterial operational taxonomical units found in a single gram of soil [3] [5].
