Scientific Publications
mTAGs: taxonomic profiling using degenerate consensus reference sequences of ribosomal RNA genes.
Bioinformatics (Oxford, England)
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 (OTUs) 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 environments, and achieved competitive (F1 score) or better results (Bray-Curtis dissimilarity) at the sub-genus level.
Bioinformatics (Oxford, England)
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