Title
Natrix: A Snakemake-Based Workflow For Processing, Clustering, And Taxonomically Assigning Amplicon Sequencing Reads
Abstract
Background Sequencing of marker genes amplified from environmental samples, known as amplicon sequencing, allows us to resolve some of the hidden diversity and elucidate evolutionary relationships and ecological processes among complex microbial communities. The analysis of large numbers of samples at high sequencing depths generated by high throughput sequencing technologies requires efficient, flexible, and reproducible bioinformatics pipelines. Only a few existing workflows can be run in a user-friendly, scalable, and reproducible manner on different computing devices using an efficient workflow management system. Results We present Natrix, an open-source bioinformatics workflow for preprocessing raw amplicon sequencing data. The workflow contains all analysis steps from quality assessment, read assembly, dereplication, chimera detection, split-sample merging, sequence representative assignment (OTUs or ASVs) to the taxonomic assignment of sequence representatives. The workflow is written using Snakemake, a workflow management engine for developing data analysis workflows. In addition, Conda is used for version control. Thus, Snakemake ensures reproducibility and Conda offers version control of the utilized programs. The encapsulation of rules and their dependencies support hassle-free sharing of rules between workflows and easy adaptation and extension of existing workflows. Natrix is freely available on GitHub () or as a Docker container on DockerHub (). Conclusion Natrix is a user-friendly and highly extensible workflow for processing Illumina amplicon data.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1186/s12859-020-03852-4
BMC BIOINFORMATICS
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Amplicon sequencing, Operational Taxonomic Units, Amplicon Sequence Variants, Snakemake, Pipline, Illumina
Journal
21
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
1471-2105
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Marius Welzel110.75
Anja Lange200.34
Dominik Heider317317.90
Michael Schwarz400.34
Bernd Freisleben51456142.68
Manfred Jensen600.34
Jens Boenigk700.34
Daniela Beisser8383.56