Corresponding author: Emese Meglécz (
Academic editor:
Metabarcoding has become a powerful approach to study biodiversity from environmental samples but it is still prone to some pitfalls. Several papers have called for good practice in study design, data production and analyses to ensure repeatability and comparability between studies. Notably, the importance of mock community samples, negative controls, and replicates is frequently highlighted (
In order to evaluate VTAM, we compared it with two other pipelines: a pipeline based on DADA2 (
VTAM therefore constitutes a complete pipeline to filter and validate metabarcoding data, from raw FASTQ data to Amplicon Sequence Variant tables with taxonomic assignments. Our pipeline aggregates a series of features rarely grouped in a single pipeline and performs a non-arbitrary parameter optimization based on internal control samples to generate conservative but informative metabarcoding datasets. We believe VTAM provides a very valuable tool for the validation of metabarcoding data, which is essential for conducting robust analyses of biodiversity.
Emese Meglécz
1st DNAQUA International Conference (March 9-11, 2021)
Precision (True positives / (True positives + False positives)) and Specificity (True negatives / (True negative + False positives)) of three pipelines, based on mock samples and negative controls, respectively.