Reference-based error correction of amplicon sequencing data from synthetic communities
AbstractMotivationSynthetic microbial communities (SynComs) constitute an emergent and powerful tool in biological, biomedical, and biotechnological research. Despite recent advances in algorithms for analysis of culture-independent amplicon sequencing data from microbial communities, there is a lack of tools specifically designed for analysing SynCom data, where reference sequences for each strain are available.ResultsHere we present Rbec, a tool designed for analysing SynCom data that outperforms current methods by accurately correcting errors in amplicon sequences and identifying intra-strain polymorphic variation. Extensive evaluation using mock bacterial and fungal communities show that our tool performs robustly for samples of varying complexity, diversity, and sequencing depth. Further, Rbec also allows accurate detection of contaminations in SynCom experiments.AvailabilityRbec is freely available as an open-source R package and can be downloaded at: https://github.com/PengfanZhang/Microbiome.