Dear Qiime 2 users, I'm new to the community and to the software itself so I have a bunch of questions that the tutorials were not able to respond. When I heard about the denoising algorithms I wanted to use on my data because I do think that clustering in OTUs is a waste of results and, since we have new strategies, they need to be used and popularized.
Well, I just started a microbiome project, it was sequenced using a V3 2x 250 library with Illumina miseq platform, I've imported my demultiplexed fastqs, trimmed for adaptors and phix sequences, in a Qiime 2 artifact, the overwall sequence quality of my samples is :
As far as I know, the V3 region is about 150 to 170 bp in length. Which makes me wonder how your reads can be 250 bp in length? The combined R1 and R2 reads would be longer than the fragment you sequenced.
Are you sure you trimmed all adapters properly? Which method did you use for trimming? And which primer pair did you use for your library preparation? Could it be that you actually sequenced V3 and V4?
Also, I found that if I don’t trim the forward primers from R1 and reverse primers from R2, Dada removes a large portion of my reads as chimeric. So it might be a good idea to add --p-trim-left-f and --p-trim-left-r to your command to prevent future problems.
I believe when you said V3 2x250 you meant the V3 Illumina chemistry kit and not V3 region, correct?
And if you did indeed target a long region such as V3-V4 it is going to be rather difficult merging them with the 2x250 bp method since that would give us ~ 500-460(V3V4 amplicon)=40bp overlap. With your existing truncating parameters, you are already cutting 80bp in total which leaves you with no overlap --> thus the failure to merge.
With dada2 you are going to need a minimum of 20bp overlap + whatever natural variation you expect from your target amplicon, let’s just say another 10bp.
If your data can’t meet the minimum overlap requirements using paired-ends, your best is to simply just use your forward reads.
Also a good point! Though if your adapters have already been trimmed (as you mentioned they have) prior to DADA2 you don’t need to do anything there. FYI, DADA2 does have its own PhiX filter so in the future you don’t have to worry about that either.
Thank you for your reply @Mehrbod_Estaki.
Yes, when I said V3 2x250 I was talking about the V3 Illumina kit.
My amplicon library contains portions of the V3-V4 region of bacterial 16S. I was afraid that the overlaping region would not be enough to merge them after the truncating parameters and yes, when I used the forward reads as SE I was able to recover a huge amont of ASVs, its a pitty to not use the full amplicon fragment though…
When I said V3 2x250 I was talking about the illumina sequencing kit/library prepraration kit and not about the hypervariable regions. My set of primers targeted the V3-V4 region and their sequences are:
Hi @Bruno_Andrade
Glad you’re able to get the data to work.
Indeed. though the resolution drop will not be as bad as you may think. That’s the trick with longer regions is that you want to make sure you are sequencing 2x300 for proper overlap otherwise it actually is a waste of money (imo)
Good luck!
