Investigating microbial eukaryotic diversity from a global census: insights from a comparison of pyrotag and full-length sequences of 18S rRNA genes.

ABSTRACT: Next-generation DNA sequencing (NGS) approaches are rapidly surpassing Sanger sequencing for characterizing the diversity of natural microbial communities. Despite this rapid transition, few comparisons exist between Sanger sequences and the generally much shorter reads of NGS. Operational taxonomic units (OTUs) derived from full-length (Sanger sequencing) and pyrotag (454 sequencing of the V9 hypervariable region) sequences of 18S rRNA genes from 10 global samples were analyzed in order to compare the resulting protistan community structures and species richness. Pyrotag OTUs called at 98% sequence similarity yielded numbers of OTUs that were similar overall to those for full-length sequences when the latter were called at 97% similarity. Singleton OTUs strongly influenced estimates of sp

SUBMITTER: Lie AA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4068655 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature