dbOTU3: A new implementation of distribution-based OTU calling

Scott W Olesen; Claire Duvallet; Eric J Alm

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0176335

dbOTU3: A new implementation of distribution-based OTU calling

PLoS One. 2017 May 4;12(5):e0176335. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0176335. eCollection 2017.

Authors

Scott W Olesen¹, Claire Duvallet¹, Eric J Alm^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Biological Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America.
² Center for Microbiome Informatics and Therapeutics, Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America.

Abstract

Distribution-based operational taxonomic unit-calling (dbOTU) improves on other approaches by incorporating information about the input sequences' distribution across samples. Previous implementations of dbOTU presented challenges for users. Here we introduce and evaluate a new implementation of dbOTU that is faster and more user-friendly. We show that this new implementation has theoretical and practical improvements over previous implementations of dbOTU, making the algorithm more accessible to microbial ecology and biomedical researchers.

MeSH terms

Algorithms
Phylogeny*

Grants and funding

This material is based on work supported by the Center for Microbiome Informatics and Therapeutics at MIT (microbiome.mit.edu). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.