Bos taurus Raw16S rRNA Amplicon Sequencing Reveals Rumen Microbial Community Structure in 38 Cattle sequence reads
The 16S ribosomal RNA gene is located on the small subunit of prokaryotic ribosomes. It comprises 10 conserved regions and 9 hypervariable regions . While the conserved regions show minimal variation across bacterial taxa, the hypervariable regions exhibit genus- or species-specific sequence differences, reflecting phylogenetic relationships. These characteristics make the 16S rDNA gene a gold-standard molecular marker for bacterial phylogeny and taxonomic identification.