The statistical treatment of data and the Analysis of MOlecular VAriance (AMOVA) in molecular microbial ecology

Molecular ecological studies are often characterised by an extremely high number of samples and by an equal high number of molecular analyses to whom the samples have been subjected. The analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) is a powerful statistical method for the description of factors influencing the structure of populations. AMOVA has been applied to different biological systems, trying to answer as many different questions. To date, AMOVA has helped the elucidation of the factors influencing the shaping of the population genetic structure in different bacterial species, showing the effects of different variables such as time, soil, drug-sensitivity, plant genotype, location in the plant root system and culture media on the genetic diversity of the bacterial populations.