and sampling times was also compared. Therefore, the differences in
absolute uptake into C pools or microbial groups had to be relativized
which was done by the divergence index (DI) according to
Dippold and Kuzyakov (2013):
The DI compares the incorporation of C from each position
with the mean C incorporation from all positions of a molecule in
any desired pool. As not all positions of glucose or ribose were
applied in this study, the mean uniformly labeled tracer C incorporations
were entered in the calculation instead. The DI reflects
the result which the experiments would have generated if
uniformly labeled tracers had been used. A DI of 1 indicates no
discrimination between positions, values above 1 indicate preferential
incorporation, and values below 1 show preferential
degradation.