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Evaluating the Information Content of Shallow Shotgun Metagenomics
Open accessAbstract
A common refrain in recent microbiome-related academic meetings is that the field needs to move away from broad taxonomic surveys using 16S sequencing and toward more powerful longitudinal studies using shotgun sequencing. However, performing deep shotgun sequencing in large longitudinal studies remains prohibitively expensive for all but the most well-funded research labs and consortia, which leads many researchers to choose 16S sequencing for large studies, followed by deep shotgun sequencing on a subset of targeted samples. Here, we show that shallow- or moderate-depth shotgun sequencing may be used by researchers to obtain species-level taxonomic and functional data at approximately the same cost as amplicon sequencing. While shallow shotgun sequencing is not intended to replace deep shotgun sequencing for strain-level characterization, we recommend that microbiome scientists consider using shallow shotgun sequencing instead of 16S sequencing for large-scale human microbiome studies.
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“we repeated all bioinformatic, normalization, and ML steps using bacterial assignments from SHOGUN31 and its separate database48, which showed highly concordant performances”
From RETRACTED ARTICLE: Microbiome analyses of blood and tissues suggest cancer diagnostic approach (2020) · cites this paper as [31]
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Citations
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Iwai, S., Weinmaier, T., Schmidt, B. L., Albertson, D. G., Poloso, N. J., Dabbagh, K., & DeSantis, T. Z. (2016) · PLoS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0166104 · Cited by 340 · cited 5×
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Reproducible, interactive, scalable and extensible microbiome data science using QIIME 2
Bolyen, E., Rideout, J. R., Dillon, M. R., Bokulich, N. A., Abnet, C. C., Al-Ghalith, G. A., Alexander, H., Alm, E. J., Arumugam, M., Asnicar, F., et al. (2019) · Nature Biotechnology · doi:10.1038/s41587-019-0209-9 · Cited by 23,742
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Self-citationRetractedDaily sampling reveals personalized diet-microbiome associations in humans
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“In the example below, we demonstrate the use of q2-shogun , a wrapper for the SHOGUN pipeline (Hillmann et al., 2018 --i-reference-reads refseqs.qza \ --i-reference-taxonomy taxonomy.qza \ --i-database bt2-database.qza \ --o-taxa-table taxatable.qza In this example, SHOGUN is called to align query…”
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Background
Metadata
- Authors
- Hillmann, B., Al-Ghalith, G. A., Shields-Cutler, R. R., Zhu, Q., Gohl, D. M., Beckman, K. B., Knight, R., & Knights, D.
- Affiliations
- University of Minnesota (US)
- Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
- Biotechnology Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
- University of California San Diego (US)
- Corresponding author
- Knights, Dan
- ORCID
- Venue
- mSystems
- Publisher
- American Society for Microbiology
- Published
- 2018-10-30
- Volume
- 3
- Issue
- 6
- ISSN
- 2379-5077 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC6234283
- OpenAlex
- W2951076599
- Cited by
- 474
- References
- 26
- Citations by year
- 2026: 52 · 2025: 66 · 2024: 57 · 2023: 61 · 2022: 60 · 2021: 82 · 2020: 68 · 2019: 24 · 2018: 2
- FWCI
- 15.65
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- mSystems (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (acceptedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- HHS | National Institutes of Health (R01AI121383, P01DK078669)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Gut microbiota and health
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecology › Microbial Community Ecology and Physiology
- Keywords
- 16S rRNA gene sequencing, functional metagenomics, amplicon sequencing
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