Additional file 2 of Sequencing introduced false positive rare taxa lead to biased microbial community diversity, assembly, and interaction interpretation in amplicon studies

Additional file 2: Figure S1. Schematic presentation of the design and flow of this study. This study was designed to evaluate the potential harm of false positives introduced by index misassignment during the sequencing to the interpretation of metabarcoding or here amplicon sequencing studies. In part 1, mock communities with known microbial composition were used to confirm the presence of index misassignment introduced false positives and the rate of this misassignment on different sequencing platform; In part 2, samples from several typical ecosystems with various complexity were sequenced to test how index misassignment could affect the estimation of community diversity for different samples; In part 3, a case study using a set of cow rumen samples was conducted to evaluate how index misassignment caused false positives could affect the interpretation of microbial ecological roles and community assembly mechanisms.