Video talks on 16S data analysis posted.

URMAP ultra-fast read mapper posted (paper).

~20% of taxonomy annotations in SILVA and Greengenes are wrong (paper).

Taxonomy prediction is <50% accurate for 16S V4 sequences (paper).

97% OTU threshold is wrong for species, should be 99% for full-length 16S, 100% V4 (paper).

Microbial taxonomy

sintax command
nbc_tax command
Recommended taxonomy reference databases
Sequence databases with taxonomy annotations
Taxonomic nomenclatures (naming systems)
Defining taxa
TAXXI benchmark
SILVA and Greengenes "taxonomies"
Phylogenetic consistency in microbial taxonomy
Confidence values for taxonomy predictions

References (please cite)
R.C. Edgar (2016), SINTAX: a simple non-Bayesian taxonomy classifier for 16S and ITS sequences, https://doi.org/10.1101/074161
  • SINTAX taxonomy prediction algorithm
  • Fast and simple method, accuracy comparable to RDP Classifier

R.C. Edgar (2018), Accuracy of taxonomy prediction for 16S rRNA and fungal ITS sequences, PeerJ 6:e4652
  • Cross-validation by identity, novel benchmark strategy enabling realistic accuracy estimates
  • Genus accuracy of best methods is 50% on V4 sequences
  • Recent algorithms do not improve on RDP Classifier or SINTAX

R.C. Edgar (2018), Taxonomy annotation and guide tree errors in 16S rRNA databases, PeerJ 6:e5030
  • Approx. one in five SILVA and Greengenes taxonomy annotations are wrong
  • SILVA and Greengenes trees have pervasive conflicts with type strain taxonomies