We are trying to figure out relative biomass of different small soil metazoa in soil DNA samples, by scaling from relative number of rRNA gene reads, to relative number of cells, to relative biomass. Any thoughts on this?
Jonathan your question is a good one - however, I dont think that we are in a stage to be able to answer. Will be happy to hear other idea !!
Yossi, I did find an old review paper on rRNA genes from 1980 which had a big table on p.732-733 for number of copies in various organisms. It seems that for small metazoa it's generally around 200 copies of the gene per cell: http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.bi.49.070180.003455
what do you mean by "different cell types of metazoa" : different cell types (different tissues) from the same organism, the same individual (intraindividual variation) ; different cells types from different organisms of one species (interindividual variation) ; different cells from different organisms belonging to different species (interspecies variation) ? I do not know very well the answer in metazoa, but in plants the answer is yes in all three cases listed! But if I consider your comment following the question my remarks could be ininteresting for you since you are rather preoccupied by a standard conversion form rRNA content to cell number and biomass. This may be simply obtained using the average number of ribosomes per cell (or per gram of biomass) in small soil metazoans, a determination that I suppose could have been made in some species...
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