Short sequence or longer sequence with ambiguous base of 16S v3-v4 sequencing

Hello @C.F_Zhang,

Welcome to the Qiime 2 forums! :qiime2:

What primers did you use for V3? How long do you expect your amplicon to be?

Here is what I think happened: the miseq correctly sequenced your full region, then it had nothing left to sequence. The 'low quality region' is just noise.

Here is one way you could check this:

vsearch --fastq_mergepairs R1.fastq --reverse R2.fastq \
--fastqout merged.fastq \
--maxdiffs 300 --fastq_allowmergestagger

That crazy high maxdiffs will mean that all reads will join if they can, and allowmergestagger will allows reads to be merged with >100% area of overlap.

I like this idea. If your region is ~120 bp long, this is the perfect choice.

Colin