Vocabulary clarification - feature vs ASV

Hello, I’d just like to confirm if feature and ASV are they the same thing? In the Moving Pictures tutorial it didn’t mention ASV but this term appears in the forums. Thanks a lot!

An ASV is a type of feature but a feature is not a type of ASV. Does that make sense?

This forum post describes the generic term "feature" and why we use it (replacing qiime1-era use of the more specific term "otu" as a general term, e.g., "otu table").

ASV appears on the forum but not the official docs as much because there is a lot of variation over the precise terminology — sequence variant vs. "actual" SV vs. "amplicon" SV vs. "denoised" SV vs. 100% OTU, etc. And while dada2/deblur output sequence variants the rest of QIIME2 is largely agnostic to the types of features contained in feature tables.

I hope that clarifies!

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