5 Microbial Profiling Using Mothur

Mothur is a software package designed for the analysis of microbial community data obtained from DNA sequencing. Briefly:

• The workflow involves preprocessing raw sequencing data by removing low-quality reads and contaminants.
• Mothur aligns the high-quality reads to a reference database, such as SILVA alignments, to assign taxonomic information.
• Clustering algorithms in Mothur group similar sequences into operational taxonomic units (OTUs) representing microbial species or taxonomic units.

In summary, microbial profiling using Mothur provides insights into the composition, structure, and function of microbial ecosystems. A more detailed description is described in IMAP-PART 05