Comprehensive Assessment of 16S rRNA Gene Amplicon Sequencing for Microbiome Profiling across Multiple Habitats
Wenke Zhang, Xiaoqian Fan, Haobo Shi, Li Jian, Mingqian Zhang, Jin Zhao, Xiaoquan Su
Abstract
16S rRNA has long been used as a biomarker to identify distinct microbes from complex communities. However, due to the influence of the amplification region, sequencing type, sequence processing, and reference database, the accuracy of 16S rRNA has not been fully verified on a global range. More importantly, the microbial composition of different habitats varies greatly, and it is necessary to adopt different strategies according to the corresponding target microbes to achieve optimal analytical performance. Here, we developed Qscore, which evaluates the comprehensive performance of 16S amplicons from multiple perspectives, thus providing the best sequencing strategies for common ecological environments by using big data.