RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Application of database-independent approach to assess the quality of OTU picking methods JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 042812 DO 10.1101/042812 A1 Patrick D. Schloss YR 2016 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/03/26/042812.abstract AB Assigning 16S rRNA gene sequences to operational taxonomic units (OTUs) allows microbial ecologists to overcome the inconsistencies and biases within bacterial taxonomy and provides a strategy for clustering similar sequences that do not have representatives in a reference database. I have applied the Matthew’s correlation coefficient to assess the ability of 15 reference-independent and ‐dependent clustering algorithms to assign sequences to OTUs. This metric quantifies the ability of an algorithm to reflect the relationships between sequences without the use of a reference and can be applied to any dataset or method. The most consistently robust method was the average neighbor algorithm; however, for some datasets other algorithms matched its performance.