title: PhyloCore: A phylogenetic approach to identifying core taxa in microbial communities.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Identifying core microbiota is an important step for understanding the key components of microbial communities. Traditional approach that identifies core taxa at the OTU level ignores potential ecological coherence of higher rank taxa. There is a need to develop software that can systematically identify core taxa at and above the species level.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Here we developed PhyloCore, an application that uses a phylogeny-based algorithm to identify core taxa at the proper taxonomic levels. It incorporates a number of features that users can set according to their needs. Using multiple gut microbiota as test cases, we demonstrate that PhyloCore is more powerful and flexible than OTU-based approaches.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  PhyloCore is a flexible and fast application that identifies core taxa at proper taxonomic levels, making it useful to sequence-based microbial ecology studies. The software is freely available at http://wolbachia.biology.virginia.edu/WuLab/Software.html.
authors: Department of Biology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA.
authors: Tiantian
authors: T
authors: Ren
authors: Department of Biology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA. Electronic address: mw4yv@virginia.edu.
authors: Martin
authors: M
authors: Wu
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D064307:Microbiota / Q000235:genetics*; D010802:Phylogeny
keywords: Core taxa; Microbiota; OTU