Taxonomic identification from metagenomic and metabarcoding data using any genetic marker

Abstract

Correct taxonomic identification of DNA sequences is central to studies of biodiversity using both shotgun metagenomic and metabarcoding approaches. However, there is no genetic marker that gives sufficient performance across all the biological kingdoms, hampering studies of taxonomic diversity in many groups of organisms. We here present an update to Metaxa2 (http://microbiology.se/software/metaxa2/) that enables the use of any genetic marker for taxonomic classification of metagenome and amplicon sequence data.