Dadaist2: a toolkit to automate and simplify statistical analysis and plotting of metabarcoding experiments

Ansorge R,Birolo G,James SA,Telatin A. (2021)

International Journal of Molecular Sciences


The taxonomic composition of microbial communities can be assessed using universal marker amplicon sequencing. The most common taxonomic markers are the 16S rDNA for bacterial communities and the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region for fungal communities, but various other markers are used for barcoding eukaryotes. A crucial step in the bioinformatic analysis of amplicon sequences is the identification of representative sequences. This can be achieved using a clustering approach or by denoising raw sequencing reads. DADA2 is a widely-adopted algorithm, released as an R library, that denoises marker-specific amplicons from next generation sequencing and produces a set of representative sequences referred to as Amplicon Sequence Variants (ASV). Here we present Dadaist2, a modular pipeline, providing a complete suite for the analysis that ranges from raw sequencing reads to the statistics of numerical ecology. Dadaist2 implements a new approach that is specifically optimised for amplicons with variable lengths, such as the fungal ITS. The pipeline focuses on streamlining the data flow from the command 


International Journal of Molecular Sciences


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