Up to Species-level Community Analysis of Human Gut Microbiota by 16S rRNA Amplicon Pyrosequencing

Pyrosequencing-based 16S rRNA profiling has become a common powerful tool to obtain the community structure of gastrointestinal tract microbiota, but it is still hard to process the massive amount of sequence data into microbial composition data, especially at the species level. Here we propose a new approach in combining the quantitative insights into microbial ecology (QIIME), Mothur and ribosomal database project (RDP) programs to efficiently process 454 pyrosequence data to bacterial composition data up to the species level. It was demonstrated to precisely convert batch sequence data of 16S rRNA V6-V8 amplicons obtained from adult Singaporean fecal samples to taxonomically annotated biota data.