Absolute counts or relative abundance for BC distance matrix

Question

[mail2steff]

Dear everyone,

I have a dataset of absolute counts and relative abundance obtained from qPCR experiments. I'm interested in calculating the Bray-Curtis dissimilarity to analyze the community structure across different samples.

My main question is:

Can I use relative abundance data directly or do I take the absolute counts abundances to calculate Bray-Curtis dissimilarity?

I'm particularly interested in understanding if there are any pitfalls or considerations I should be aware of when using relative abundance data for this type of analysis. Any insights or recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

[Ram]

Please do not use bioinformatics as a tag unless your post is about the field of bioinformatics itself. For proper examples, please see Forum and News type posts under https://www.biostars.org/tag/bioinformatics/

I've removed the tag this time but please be more mindful in the future.