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Published on: October 15, 2019
Metagenomic species profiling using universal phylogenetic marker genes
Shinichi Sunagawa1, Daniel R Mende, Georg Zeller
1European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany.
Abstract:
To quantify known and unknown microorganisms at species-level resolution using shotgun sequencing data, we developed a method that establishes metagenomic operational taxonomic units (mOTUs) based on single-copy phylogenetic marker genes. Applied to 252 human fecal samples, the method revealed that on average 43% of the species abundance and 58% of the richness cannot be captured by current reference genome-based methods. An implementation of the method is available at http://www.bork.embl.de/software/mOTU/.
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