Hi everyone!
I’m working on my bachelor’s thesis and it’s about how a microbiome data analysis is performed. I’m trying to explain every step of the pipeline showing the different methods and how every process works in details. So It’s have been a bit difficult to explain in details how demultiplexing works. In a broad way, I know that the process does, like described in Qiime2 documentation. Can someone suggest me a reference to have a better understanding or explain me what the algorithm does with some details?
QIIME 2 currently has two plugins that support demultiplexing reads --- one that works with EMP-formatted reads, the other is a cutadapt-based plugin. As for the cutadapt plugin, you would need to read the cutadapt source and docs to get an idea of how that works --- we aren't the developers of cutadapt, we just use it. As for the EMP demuxing, that one doesn't really have an "algorithm" - it just looks at two (single-end) or three (paired-end) files - one file has the barcodes, the other(s) have the reads. If the first record in the barcodes file matches a barcode in our sample metadata file, then we copy the associated read(s) to the demuxed file for that particular sample.
Thanks a lot for your answer and suggestion Matthew the example image looks great! I’ll try to read the sources to have a better understanding. As soon as I do, I’ll leave the comment here for everyone give a little contribution.
Good point @jwdebelius! Also worth noting, the EMP-demux in q2-demux does not perform any type of Golay error correction at present (it is on our todo list!). Thanks!
