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Science 18 August 2006:
Vol. 313. no. 5789, p. 918
DOI: 10.1126/science.1121225
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Technical Comments

Comment on "Computational Improvements Reveal Great Bacterial Diversity and High Metal Toxicity in Soil"

Igor Volkov1,2*, Jayanth R. Banavar1 and Amos Maritan3

1 Department of Physics, 104 Davey Lab, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA.
2 Department of Biology, 208 Mueller Lab, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA.
3 Dipartimento di Fisica Galileo Galilei, Università di Padova and Istituto Nazionale per la Fisica Della Materia, via Marzolo 8, 35131 Padova, Italy.


Figure 1 Fig. 1. Cot curves for noncontaminated (red), low-contaminated (blue), and highly contaminated (green) samples, along with the fits to the delta model of species abundance. [View Larger Version of this Image (19K GIF file)]
 

Figure 2 Fig. 2. Cot curves for (A) noncontaminated (red), (B) low-contaminated (blue), and (C) highly contaminated (green) samples, along with the fits to the zipf model of species abundance. In each case, the data are fitted to several versions of the model with varying numbers of species S as shown in the inset. The blue solid lines represent the best fit in accord with analysis in (1). The other lines are fits in which the number of species is decreased by factors of 8.2 and 82 for the pristine soil and increased by factors of 3.56 and 50 for the two polluted cases, with little degradation in the quality of fit. The most sensitive region of the Cot curve occurs when [C]/[C0] becomes small compared with 1, and the experimental data does not extend to this regime. [View Larger Version of this Image (11K GIF file)]
 

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