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bioRxiv · 10.1101/088666

UNCROSS: Filtering of high-frequency cross-talk in 16S amplicon reads

Edgar, R. C.
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Abstract

Next-generation amplicon sequencing is widely used for surveying biological diversity in applications such as microbial metagenomics, immune system repertoire analysis and targeted tumor sequencing of cancer-associated genes. In such studies, assignment of reads to incorrect samples (cross-talk) is a well-documented problem that is rarely considered in practice. By considering unexpected OTUs in artificial (mock) samples, I estimate that cross-talk occurred for ~2% of the reads in one Illumina GAIIx run and eleven Illumina MiSeq runs targeting 16S ribosomal RNA. I also describe UNCROSS, an algorithm for detecting and filtering cross-talk in OTU tables.

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Edgar, R. C.. 2016-11-19. UNCROSS: Filtering of high-frequency cross-talk in 16S amplicon reads. https://doi.org/10.1101/088666

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