Erratum to: Stability of operational taxonomic units: an important but neglected property for analyzing microbial diversity

After publication of this work [1], we noted that one of the references in the introduction was not described properly. With respect to the original authors, we clarify that this sentence in introduction: “Due to the lack of a gold standard of ‘correct’ OTUs, several measurements have been used to evaluate the performance of clustering methods, for example, rationality of OTU structure [2, 3], computational efficiency (that is, runtime and memory requirements) [4], and the ability to cope with OTU inflation [5]” should be stated as “Due to the lack of a gold standard of ‘correct’ OTUs, several measurements have been used to evaluate the performance of clustering methods, for example, rationality of OTU structure [2], use of the Matthew’s Correlation Coefficient [3], computational efficiency (that is, runtime and memory requirements) [4], and the ability to cope with OTU inflation [5]”.

Affiliations

1. State Key Laboratory of Organ Failure Research, Department of Environmental Health, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Tropical Disease Research, School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, 510515, China

   • Yan He
   • , Xiao-Tao Jiang
   • , Hua-Fang Sheng
   •  & Hong-Wei Zhou

2. Department of Biological Sciences, Northern Arizona University, PO Box 5640, Flagstaff, AZ, 86011-5640, USA

   • J. Gregory Caporaso

3. Center for Microbial Genetics and Genomics, Northern Arizona University, PO Box 4073, Flagstaff, AZ, 86011-4073, USA

   • J. Gregory Caporaso
   •  & Jai Ram Rideout

4. Department of Pathology and Laboratory Science, Warren Alpert Medical School, Brown University, 70 Ship Street, Providence, RI, 02912, USA

   • Susan M. Huse

5. Tiburon, CA, 94920, USA

   • Robert C. Edgar

6. Department of Pediatrics, University of California at San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive MC0763, La Jolla, CA, 92093-0763, USA

   • Evguenia Kopylova
   •  & Rob Knight

7. Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Cornell University, 526 Campus Road, Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA

   • William A. Walters

8. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California at San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive MC0763, La Jolla, CA, 92093-0763, USA

   • Rob Knight

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hong-Wei Zhou.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Authors’ contributions

YH, XTJ, SMH, RK, and HWZ conceived the method; JGC, JRR, RCE, and WAW implemented the software; YH, XTJ, JGC, HFS, SMH, and HWZ performed the experiments and analyzed the data; YH, SMH, JGC, JK, EK, RK, and HWZ wrote the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

The online version of the original article can be found under doi:10.1186/s40168-015-0081-x.

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