MTAGs: taxonomic profiling using degenerate consensus reference sequences of ribosomal RNA genes.

ABSTRACT: Profiling the taxonomic composition of microbial communities commonly involves the classification of ribosomal RNA gene fragments. As a trade-off to maintain high classification accuracy, existing tools are typically limited to the genus level. Here, we present mTAGs, a taxonomic profiling tool that implements the alignment of metagenomic sequencing reads to degenerate consensus reference sequences of small subunit ribosomal RNA genes. It uses DNA fragments, that is, paired-end sequencing reads, as count units and provides relative abundance profiles at multiple taxonomic ranks, including operational taxonomic units based on a 97% sequence identity cutoff. At the genus rank, mTAGs outperformed other tools across several metrics, such as the F1 score by >11% across data from different envir

SUBMITTER: Salazar G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8696115 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature