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      From Benchtop to Desktop: Important Considerations when Designing Amplicon Sequencing Workflows

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      PLoS ONE
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          Abstract

          Amplicon sequencing has been the method of choice in many high-throughput DNA sequencing (HTS) applications. To date there has been a heavy focus on the means by which to analyse the burgeoning amount of data afforded by HTS. In contrast, there has been a distinct lack of attention paid to considerations surrounding the importance of sample preparation and the fidelity of library generation. No amount of high-end bioinformatics can compensate for poorly prepared samples and it is therefore imperative that careful attention is given to sample preparation and library generation within workflows, especially those involving multiple PCR steps. This paper redresses this imbalance by focusing on aspects pertaining to the benchtop within typical amplicon workflows: sample screening, the target region, and library generation. Empirical data is provided to illustrate the scope of the problem. Lastly, the impact of various data analysis parameters is also investigated in the context of how the data was initially generated. It is hoped this paper may serve to highlight the importance of pre-analysis workflows in achieving meaningful, future-proof data that can be analysed appropriately. As amplicon sequencing gains traction in a variety of diagnostic applications from forensics to environmental DNA (eDNA) it is paramount workflows and analytics are both fit for purpose.

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          Galaxy: a comprehensive approach for supporting accessible, reproducible, and transparent computational research in the life sciences

          Increased reliance on computational approaches in the life sciences has revealed grave concerns about how accessible and reproducible computation-reliant results truly are. Galaxy http://usegalaxy.org, an open web-based platform for genomic research, addresses these problems. Galaxy automatically tracks and manages data provenance and provides support for capturing the context and intent of computational methods. Galaxy Pages are interactive, web-based documents that provide users with a medium to communicate a complete computational analysis.
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            Fast UniFrac: Facilitating high-throughput phylogenetic analyses of microbial communities including analysis of pyrosequencing and PhyloChip data

            Next-generation sequencing techniques, and PhyloChip, have made simultaneous phylogenetic analyses of hundreds of microbial communities possible. Insight into community structure has been limited by the inability to integrate and visualize such vast datasets. Fast UniFrac overcomes these issues, allowing integration of larger numbers of sequences and samples into a single analysis. Its new array-based implementation offers orders of magnitude improvements over the original version. New 3D visualization of principal coordinates analysis (PCoA) results, with the option to view multiple coordinate axes simultaneously, provides a powerful way to quickly identify patterns that relate vast numbers of microbial communities. We demonstrate the potential of Fast UniFrac using examples from three data types: Sanger-sequencing studies of diverse free-living and animal-associated bacterial assemblages and from the gut of obese humans as they diet, pyrosequencing data integrated from studies of the human hand and gut, and PhyloChip data from a study of citrus pathogens. We show that a Fast UniFrac analysis using a reference tree recaptures patterns that could not be detected without considering phylogenetic relationships and that Fast UniFrac, coupled with BLAST-based sequence assignment, can be used to quickly analyze pyrosequencing runs containing hundreds of thousands of sequences, revealing patterns relating human and gut samples. Finally, we show that the application of Fast UniFrac to PhyloChip data could identify well-defined subcategories associated with infection. Together, these case studies point the way towards a broad range of applications and demonstrate some of the new features of Fast UniFrac.
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              Applications of next generation sequencing in molecular ecology of non-model organisms.

              As most biologists are probably aware, technological advances in molecular biology during the last few years have opened up possibilities to rapidly generate large-scale sequencing data from non-model organisms at a reasonable cost. In an era when virtually any study organism can 'go genomic', it is worthwhile to review how this may impact molecular ecology. The first studies to put the next generation sequencing (NGS) to the test in ecologically well-characterized species without previous genome information were published in 2007 and the beginning of 2008. Since then several studies have followed in their footsteps, and a large number are undoubtedly under way. This review focuses on how NGS has been, and can be, applied to ecological, population genetic and conservation genetic studies of non-model species, in which there is no (or very limited) genomic resources. Our aim is to draw attention to the various possibilities that are opening up using the new technologies, but we also highlight some of the pitfalls and drawbacks with these methods. We will try to provide a snapshot of the current state of the art for this rapidly advancing and expanding field of research and give some likely directions for future developments.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Academic Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )
                1932-6203
                22 April 2015
                2015
                : 10
                : 4
                : e0124671
                Affiliations
                [001]Trace and Environmental DNA Laboratory, Department of Environment and Agriculture, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia, Australia
                Natural History Museum of Denmark, DENMARK
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                Conceived and designed the experiments: DCM MB. Performed the experiments: DCM MLC. Analyzed the data: DCM. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: MB. Wrote the paper: DCM MB. Edited the manuscript: DCM MB MLC.

                Article
                PONE-D-14-48621
                10.1371/journal.pone.0124671
                4406758
                25902146
                24a76f73-6cf0-441c-80cf-f28c9a2e3ca7
                Copyright @ 2015

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

                History
                : 1 December 2014
                : 16 March 2015
                Page count
                Figures: 4, Tables: 1, Pages: 21
                Funding
                MB was funded from the Australian Research Council grant FT0991741 and DP120103725. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
                Categories
                Research Article
                Custom metadata
                All relevant data are within the paper, Supporting Information files or are available from Data Dryad (doi: 10.5061/dryad.2qf0t).

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