title: Computational integration of genomic traits into 16S rDNA microbiota sequencing studies.
abstract: Molecular sequencing techniques help to understand microbial biodiversity with regard to species richness, assembly structure and function. In this context, available methods are barcoding, metabarcoding, genomics and metagenomics. The first two are restricted to taxonomic assignments, whilst genomics only refers to functional capabilities of a single organism. Metagenomics by contrast yields information about organismal and functional diversity of a community. However currently it is very demanding regarding labour and costs and thus not applicable to most laboratories. Here, we show in a proof-of-concept that computational approaches are able to retain functional information about microbial communities assessed through 16S rDNA (meta)barcoding by referring to reference genomes. We developed an automatic pipeline to show that such integration may infer preliminary or supplementary genomic content of a community. We applied it to two biological datasets and delineated significantly overrepresented protein families between communities. The script alongside supporting data is available at http://bioapps.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de.
authors.affiliation: Department of Animal Ecology and Tropical Biology, Biocenter, University of Würzburg, Germany. Electronic address: a.keller@biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de.
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Keller
authors.affiliation: Department of Bioinformatics, Biocenter, University of Würzburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Hannes
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Horn
authors.affiliation: Department of Bioinformatics, Biocenter, University of Würzburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Frank
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Förster
authors.affiliation: Department of Bioinformatics, Biocenter, University of Würzburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Jörg
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Schultz
mesh_terms: D001419:Bacteria / Q000145:classification / Q000235:genetics*; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D058893:DNA Barcoding, Taxonomic; D004269:DNA, Bacterial / Q000235:genetics*; D004275:DNA, Ribosomal / Q000235:genetics*; D005819:Genetic Markers; D016680:Genome, Bacterial; D023281:Genomics; D056186:Metagenomics; D064307:Microbiota / Q000235:genetics*; D005810:Multigene Family; D012336:RNA, Ribosomal, 16S / Q000235:genetics*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results
chemical_list: D004269:DNA, Bacterial; D004275:DNA, Ribosomal; D005819:Genetic Markers; D012336:RNA, Ribosomal, 16S
keywords: 16S rDNA; Metabarcoding; Metagenomics; Molecular biodiversity; Molecular community ecology; Molecular functional ecology