Bayesian community-wide culture-independent microbial source tracking.

Knights, Dan; Kuczynski, Justin; Charlson, Emily S; Zaneveld, Jesse; Mozer, Michael C; Collman, Ronald G; Bushman, Frederic D; Knight, Rob et al. · Nat Methods · 2011

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Abstract

Contamination is a critical issue in high-throughput metagenomic studies, yet progress toward a comprehensive solution has been limited. We present SourceTracker, a Bayesian approach to estimate the proportion of contaminants in a given community that come from possible source environments. We applied SourceTracker to microbial surveys from neonatal intensive care units (NICUs), offices and molecular biology laboratories, and provide a database of known contaminants for future testing.

Medical subject headings