Experimental Design Sample Work

From experimental design to molecular and computational analyses, we present an overview of current best practices in the metabarcoding investigation of fungal communities. We show that operational taxonomic units (OTUs) outperform amplified sequence variants (ASVs) in recovering fungal diversity, especially for lengthy markers, by reanalyzing published data collection sets. Furthermore, as compared to the ITS2 sub region, examination of the whole ITS region allows for more precise taxonomic placement of fungus and other eukaryotes. Finally, we show that specialized strategies for analyzing compositional data yield more trustworthy estimations of community structure alterations.