Rob Knight

TL;DR: Modification of modified 16S rRNA gene and internal transcribed spacer (ITS) primers for archaea/bacteria and fungi with nonaquatic samples demonstrated that two recently modified primer pairs that target taxonomically discriminatory regions of bacterial and fungal genomic DNA do not introduce new biases when used on a variety of sample types.

TL;DR: A novel sub-operational-taxonomic-unit (sOTU) approach that uses error profiles to obtain putative error-free sequences from Illumina MiSeq and HiSeq sequencing platforms, Deblur, which substantially reduces computational demands relative to similar sOTU methods and does so with similar or better sensitivity and specificity.

TL;DR: Two standards developed by the Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC) for reporting bacterial and archaeal genome sequences are presented, including the Minimum Information about a Single Amplified Genome (MISAG) and the Minimum information about a Metagenome-Assembled Genomes (MIMAG), including estimates of genome completeness and contamination.

TL;DR: SourceTracker, a Bayesian approach to estimate the proportion of contaminants in a given community that come from possible source environments, is presented, and microbial surveys from neonatal intensive care units, offices and molecular biology laboratories are applied.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used barcoded pyrosequencing to comprehensively survey archaeal and bacterial communities in 146 soils, representing a multitude of soil and ecosystem types from across the globe.