Separation power of the 95 substrates of the BIOLOG system determined in various soils

The separation power of the 95 substrates of the BIOLOG GN plates was tested using soil from Denmark, Germany and Italy. The data set comprised 420 BIOLOG plates, 195 of them incubated at 14 degrees C and 225 incubated at 30 degrees C. We calculated the ratio of the between soil variation to the within soil variation of each substrate to obtain two lists of carbon sources ranked according to their separation power. These results suggest that the use of a reduced set of discriminating carbon sources, with a higher number of replicates on each plate, would be a better approach because statistical tests like MANOVA and related techniques can be applied.