7 Data Preparation

Processing the OTU (Operational Taxonomic Unit) table is an important step in preparing data for downstream analysis. Prerequisite may include:

• A CSV (comma-separated values) or tab-delimited text files or a
• Phyloseq object which contains typically containing:
  • Sample metadata
  • OTU or ASV abundance Ddta
  • Taxonomy data
  • Phylogenetic tree data

Performing necessary data cleaning steps to remove any irrelevant or problematic entries. This may involve removing duplicate entries, handling missing values, or addressing any formatting issues.

A more detailed description is described in IMAP-PART07