The Overlooked Fact: the Critical Role of Bioinformatics Pipeline in Microbiome Analysis

Abstract

The research on the human microbiome has gained significant popularity over the past couple of years across both scientific and public communities. This area has revealed considerable knowledge, mainly thanks to next-generation sequencing. Even though technology possibilities evolve faster than ever, and there is an enormous amount of publicly available data, there are not yet precise procedures, methods, and bioinformatics tools to work accurately enough with microbiome data, and there are no standardized recommendations for bioinformatics pipelines to assess the most accurate results. Here, we demonstrate the potential inaccuracies that can arise from various bioinformatics processing of amplicon 16S RNA sequencing data by performing a comparative analysis of diverse pipeline configurations using mock community samples and biological material originating from biopsy samples obtained during regular colonoscopy from patients with primary sclerosing cholangitis.