Normalizing CAZy data

Question

[Morgan S.]

Hi,

I am annotating two fungal genomes. I have run the genomes through dbCAN database to determine how many of the putative proteins encode CAZy enzymes, but now I am trying to figure out if I can simply report the relative abundance of the genes for each genome, or if I need to show some sort of normalization of the number of enzymes?

Many papers that I have read normalize their reads in some way, but I believe that this is because these are based off transcripts, not a "near" complete genome.

Like shown here in figure 2:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320565582_Predicted_microbial_secretomes_and_their_target_substrates_in_marine_sediment/figures?lo=1&utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic

or here: https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/313095/fmicb-09-00299-HTML/image_m/fmicb-09-00299-g002.jpg

I hope this makes sense. Please share your thoughts.

Thanks in advance! Morgan