Singleton, D. R., M. A. Furlong, S. L. Rathbun, and W. B. Whitman. 2001. Quantitative comparisons of 16S rRNA gene sequence libraries from environmental samples. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 67:4374-4376

To determine the significance of differences between clonal libraries of environmental rRNA gene sequences, differences between homologous coverage curves, C_x(D), and heterologous coverage curves, C_xy(D), were calculated by a Cramer-von Mises-type statistic and compared by a Monte Carlo test procedures.  This method successfully distinguished rRNA gene sequence libraries from soil and bioreactors and correctly failed to find differences between libraries of the same composition.