Last week, a preprint describing a study which I have played a small part in was posted on bioRxiv. This paper (1) uses the Metaxa2 database (2) to tease out how much of an effect mitochondrial rRNA sequences have on studies of bacterial diversity in corals. And it turns out that it matters… a lot. Importantly, by supplementing the taxonomic databases with diverse mitochondrial rRNA sequences from the Metaxa2 database, ~97% of unique unclassified sequences could be resolved as mitochondrial, without increasing the level of misannotation in mock communities. Thus the study not only points to a problem, but also to its solution! You can read it all here.

References

  1. Sonnet D, Brown T, Bengtsson-Palme J, Padilla-Gamiño J, Zaneveld JR: The Organelle in the Room: Under-annotated Mitochondrial Reads Bias Coral Microbiome Analysis. bioRxiv, 431501 (2021). doi: 10.1101/2021.02.23.431501 [Link]
  2. Bengtsson-Palme J, Hartmann M, Eriksson KM, Pal C, Thorell K, Larsson DGJ, Nilsson RH: Metaxa2: Improved identification and taxonomic classification of small and large subunit rRNA in metagenomic data. Molecular Ecology Resources, 15, 6, 1403–1414 (2015). doi: 10.1111/1755-0998.12399 [Paper link]