Enrich a standard database

[colinbrislawn (Colin J Brislawn)]

Hello Stephanie,

@Steph_Hp

But I want to identify some specific group of fungi that I can download from NCBI database and others that I already have from a previous work and are not that common in standard databases as UNITE.

Sounds like a cool project and a great way to build off previous work!

@Steph_Hp

I'd like to enrich or add these new sequences to the UNITE database and trained my classifier in order to assign taxonomy again.

I don't know of an easy way to do this within Qiime2...

@Steph_Hp

Is that possible and If so, how can I do this?

But it is possible!

Here are two ways I would do this:

1. Use a 'mini-database'
   After reporting the results from the existing database, I would run a classifier or alignment against only the taxa of interest from the previous work. For ASVs that matched this 'mini-database,' I would offer this as an 'alternative' or 'improved' classification. During the discussion, I would talk about these ASVs using their new classification.

2. Build a new database
   I like your description of an 'enriched' database. The only way I know to build this is to add these sequences at the very start of the database building process... which ends with a new database. Fortunately, we have the RESCRIPt plugin for building databases and an awesome tutorial!

Databases are hard! I'm also interested in an elegant way to enrich a database like you described!

If you want to try one of those options, we would be happy to help!