by Scott Olesen and Claire Duvallet
swo at alum dot mit dot edu

Distribution-based OTU calling (dbOTU, also known as distribution-based clustering improves on other approaches to calling operational taxonomic units (OTUs) by incorporating information about the input sequences' distribution across samples. Previous implementations of dbOTU presented challenges for users. dbOTU3 is a new implementation of dbOTU that is faster and more user-friendly.

The theoretical and practical improvements over previous implementations of dbOTU are described in this paper:

Scott W. Olesen, Claire Duvallet, and Eric J. Alm. 2017. dbOTU3: A new implementation of distribution-based OTU calling. PLoS ONE 12(5): e0176335. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0176335

The original dbOTU algorithm was developed by Sarah Preheim and used to process Illumina Genome Analyzer II reads for 16S rRNA sequence analysis in this paper:

Sarah P. Preheim, Allison R. Perrotta, Antonio M. Martin-Platero, Anika Gupta and Eric J. Alm. 2013. Distribution-based clustering: Using ecology to refine the operational taxonomic unit. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 2013, 79(21):659 doi: 10.1128/AEM.00342-13

SOURCE
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