Combining NCBI and BOLD databases for OTU assignment in metabarcoding and metagenomic datasets: The BOLD_NCBI _Merger

By

Macher, Jan-Niklas
Macher, Till-Hendrik
Leese, Florian 1978-

Type

Article

Date of Publication

2017-12-15

Original Publication

Metabarcoding and metagenomics

Volume

1

Pages

1--8

Subjects

Biodiversity , high-throughput sequencing , high-throughput sequencing , MEGAN , operational taxonomic unit , script , software , taxonomic assignment

Contributed by

Pensoft Publishers

Language

English

Published by

Bulgaria Pensoft Publishers 2017-

Identifiers

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3897/mbmg.1.22262

 

Abstract

Metabarcoding and metagenomic approaches are becoming routine techniquesfor use in biodiversity assessment and in ecological studies. The assignment of taxonomic information to millions of sequences obtained via high-throughput sequencing is challenging, as many DNA reference libraries are lacking information on certain taxonomic groups and can contain erroneous sequences. Combining different reference databases is therefore a promising approach for maximising taxonomic coverage and reliability of results. <br> The “BOLD_NCBI_Merger” bash script is introduced, which combines sequence data obtained from the National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) GenBank and the Barcode of Life Database (BOLD) and prepares it for taxonomic assignment with the software MEGAN.