My research question is: does the microbiome function in food spoilage? I am trying to determine the function of the most common OTUs in my 16S data. I have done “by hand” for the ~20 most abundance OTUs by searching the genus/species assignment in a journal database. This has given me an idea of what some of the potential functions are for those OTUs.
I am looking for a more efficient way to find the potential functions. PICRUSt2 seems to a potential avenue to do this analysis, though I don’t fully understand what the final output of the pipeline will be. I am having trouble installing the QIIME2 plugin on my compute cluster, so I am not able to do a test run with either my samples or the tutorial data at the moment. Can anyone tell me what the final output looks like? Does it include potential functions of all OTUs? Or is it related to predicting specific functions?