Table 1. Characteristics of six mock communities (library 1–6) after in silico sequencing simulation and OTU picking.

Mock community	1	2	3	4	5	6
No. of reads	200,000	200,000	400,000	400,000	600,000	600,000
No. of reference genomes	25	40	25	40	25	40
No. of merged reads	2232	1755	4645	3494	6974	5117
Reads passed filtering (%)	66.0	61.8	63.8	62.0	64.2	62.3
No. of unique sequences	603	517	948	879	1271	1169
No. of singletons	458	396	666	646	906	861
OTUs_97% similarity	25	36	25	37	25	37