Short pyrosequencing reads suffice for accurate microbial community analysis

Pyrosequencing technology allows us to characterize microbial communities using 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) sequences orders of magnitude faster and more cheaply than has previously been possible. However, results from different studies using pyrosequencing and traditional sequencing are often difficult to compare, because amplicons covering different regions of the rRNA might yield different conclusions. We used sequences from over 200 globally dispersed environments to test whether studies that used similar primers clustered together mistakenly, without regard to environment. We then tested whether primer choice affects sequence-based community analyses using UniFrac, our recently-developed method for comparing…

• WM
  W. M. Keck Foundation
• NI
  National Institutes of Health

  Award: T32GM065103