Hi everyone,

I am currently analysing environmental metaproteomic data and I am looking for advises regarding the best statistical approach I should use considering that one replicate is missing for one condition.

Briefly, we sampled surface sea water at dawn and dusk over three consecutive days. We filtered it on 0.8µm filter and 0.2µm filter in order to collect the free-living and the particle-attached bacterial communities, respectively. Then, we performed metaproteomic analysis on all 0.8µm and 0.2µm filters. Unfortunately, we failed at extracting enough protein from the 0.2µm filters of the third sampling day, ending up with only 4 metaproteomes for the 0.2µm fraction.

Therefore, from a statistical perspective, I am wondering what would be the best approach to compare the remaining 10 metaproteomes.

I attached a graphical view to illustrate my words. Hope it will help.

I thank you in advance for any feedback provided. They will be greatly appreciated.

Have a nice day,

Augustin