Amplicon Sequence Variants Artificially Split Bacterial Genomes into Separate Clusters.

ABSTRACT: Amplicon sequencing variants (ASVs) have been proposed as an alternative to operational taxonomic units (OTUs) for analyzing microbial communities. ASVs have grown in popularity, in part because of a desire to reflect a more refined level of taxonomy since they do not cluster sequences based on a distance-based threshold. However, ASVs and the use of overly narrow thresholds to identify OTUs increase the risk of splitting a single genome into separate clusters. To assess this risk, I analyzed the intragenomic variation of 16S rRNA genes from the bacterial genomes represented in an rrn copy number database, which contained 20,427 genomes from 5,972 species. As the number of copies of the 16S rRNA gene increased in a genome, the number of ASVs also increased. There was an average of 0

SUBMITTER: Schloss PD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8386465 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature