It would be great if mothur could do some analyses to help identify which OTUs are the most responsible for differentiating samples/treatments.
For example,
Dufrene and Legendre. 1997. Ecological Monographs
Bakker. 2008. J Applied Ecology
Absolutely, it’s on the short list
Here is a paper that applies Indicator Species Analysis to a microbial community pyrosequence dataset:
Cardenas et al. 2010 AEM
doi:10.1128/AEM.01097-10
Did they pick up the idea in this forum?!