Comparison Between 16S RRNA and Shotgun Sequencing Data for the Taxonomic Characterization of the Gut Microbiota

Overview

Journal Sci Rep

Specialty Science

Date 2021 Feb 5

PMID 33542369

Citations 173

Authors

Francesco Durazzi

Claudia Sala

Gastone Castellani

Gerardo Manfreda

Daniel Remondini

Alessandra De Cesare

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

In this paper we compared taxonomic results obtained by metataxonomics (16S rRNA gene sequencing) and metagenomics (whole shotgun metagenomic sequencing) to investigate their reliability for bacteria profiling, studying the chicken gut as a model system. The experimental conditions included two compartments of gastrointestinal tracts and two sampling times. We compared the relative abundance distributions obtained with the two sequencing strategies and then tested their capability to distinguish the experimental conditions. The results showed that 16S rRNA gene sequencing detects only part of the gut microbiota community revealed by shotgun sequencing. Specifically, when a sufficient number of reads is available, Shotgun sequencing has more power to identify less abundant taxa than 16S sequencing. Finally, we showed that the less abundant genera detected only by shotgun sequencing are biologically meaningful, being able to discriminate between the experimental conditions as much as the more abundant genera detected by both sequencing strategies.

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