Introducing mothur: open-source, platform-independent, community-supported software for describing and comparing microbial communities.
mothur aims to be a comprehensive software package that allows users to use a single piece of software to analyze community sequence data. It builds upon previous tools to provide a flexible and powerful software package for analyzing sequencing data. As a case study, we used mothur to trim, screen, and align sequences; calculate distances; assign sequences to operational taxonomic units; and describe the alpha and beta diversity of eight marine samples previously characterized by pyrosequencing of 16S rRNA gene fragments. This analysis of more than 222,000 sequences was completed in less than 2 h with a laptop computer.
Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA. pschloss@umich.edu
Patrick D
PD
Schloss
Sarah L
SL
Westcott
Thomas
T
Ryabin
Justine R
JR
Hall
Martin
M
Hartmann
Emily B
EB
Hollister
Ryan A
RA
Lesniewski
Brian B
BB
Oakley
Donovan H
DH
Parks
Courtney J
CJ
Robinson
Jason W
JW
Sahl
Blaz
B
Stres
Gerhard G
GG
Thallinger
David J
DJ
Van Horn
Carolyn F
CF
Weber
D044822:Biodiversity; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D004783:Environmental Microbiology; D056186:Metagenomics / Q000379:methods*; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA; D012984:Software