Merged virus file abundance--is it really abundance or something else?

Microbial community profiling MetaPhlAn
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I used the most updated version of metaphlan4/databases to obtained --profile vsc for each of my samples. I then merged them into an abundance table. I summed up all the kSGB and uSGB for each sample and am getting different total values ranging from 1.99 to 52.3 for my samples. Typically when relative abundance tables are made in metaphlan, they sum to 100. Why am I getting a different number for each sample, if I am using a merge relative abundance table?

This is what my output looks like. The first row shows me summing up what is present in each column.

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I used merge_vsc_tables.py to make the above table.

Thank you for your help with answering this question!

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HI @young_doktor

The output of the viral profiling is not a relative abundance (i.e. won’t sum up to 100), rather it reports statistics about the coverage of each detected Viral Sequence Group (VSG) This is described in MetaPhlAn 4.1 · biobakery/biobakery Wiki · GitHub

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