16S rRNA Gene Analysis with QIIME2

Abstract

Microbial marker-gene sequence data can be used to generate comprehensive taxonomic profiles of the microorganisms present in a given community and for other community diversity analyses. The process of going from raw gene sequences to taxonomic profiles or diversity measures involves a series of data transformations performed by numerous computational tools. This includes tools for sequence quality checking, denoising, taxonomic classification, alignment, and phylogenetic tree building. In this chapter, we demonstrate how the Quantitative Insights Into Microbial Ecology version 2 (QIIME2) software suite can simplify 16S rRNA marker-gene analysis. We walk through an example data set extracted from the guts of bumblebees in order to show how QIIME2 can transform raw sequences into taxonomic bar plots, phylogenetic trees, principal co-ordinates analyses, and other visualizations of microbial diversity.

Keywords: 16S rRNA gene; Bioinformatics; Marker gene; Microbial ecology; QIIME.