Because of the potential for PCR bias in estimating microbial abundance, including differential primer
efficiencies, differential target strand amplification, differential
recovery efficiency from the DNA extraction process, and no
adequate controls for these biases, this paper focused on microbial
diversity rather than on target enumeration. Nucleotide sequences
developed as part of this study can be further evaluated in the
publicly available Genebank database (accession numbers
GQ183137–GQ183447).