Biology subjects

Robert Edgar

Publications and source records attributed to Robert Edgar.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2016

UCHIME2: improved chimera prediction for amplicon sequencing

Amplicon sequencing generates chimeric reads which can cause spurious inferences of biological variation. I describe UCHIME2, an update of the popular UCHIME chimera detection algorithm with new modes optimized for high-resolution biological sequence reconstruction (\"denoising\") and other applications. I show that chimera frequency correlates inversely with divergence, that error-free chimera prediction from sequence is impossible in principle, and that UCHIME2 achieves higher detection accuracy than previous methods.

Bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2016

SINTAX: a simple non-Bayesian taxonomy classifier for 16S and ITS sequences

Metagenomics experiments often characterize microbial communities by sequencing the ribosomal 16S and ITS regions. Taxonomy prediction is a fundamental step in such studies. The SINTAX algorithm predicts taxonomy by using k-mer similarity to identify the top hit in a reference database and provides bootstrap confidence for all ranks in the prediction. SINTAX achieves comparable or better accuracy to the RDP Naive Bayesian Classifier with a simpler algorithm that does not require training. Most tested methods are shown to have high rates of over-classification errors where novel taxa are incorrectly predicted to have known names.

Bioinformatics↗