I am sorry for the lag in my reply, I have been swamped with other stuff. So, I appreciate your reply but it still doesn't specifically explain what the values in the cells correspond to. I know that they are supposed to represent abundance of reads but that doesn't make sense to me...
Here is an example from my results:
Bacteria X has the following percentiles from 0 to 100% respectively for treatment 1... 1 - 84 - 283 - 825 - 3645 whereas treatment 2 has the following percentiles... 19 - 327 - 1075 - 2143 - 179480.
For the 25% percentile, we have 84 for Treatment 1 vs. 327 for Treatment 2. Does this mean that 84 reads that are identified as Bacteria X in Treatment 1 equals 25% of the total reads identified as Bacteria X and that 285 reads that are identified as Bacteria X in Treatment 1 equals 50% of the total reads identified as Bacteria X? If that were true then why isn't 283 (50th percentile) twice the amount of 84 (25th percentile)? Also if this were true, why wouldn't we just look the 100th percentile to see how many total reads are associated with a given taxon? Can you please explain exactly what these numbers (in the cells) mean because they clearly can't be interpreted the same way that one would interpret percentiles for test scores for instance...
Thanks.