Microbial Community Composition and Diversity via 16S rRNA Gene Amplicons: Evaluating the Illumina Platform
Figure 2
Distribution of sequence lengths for matching barcodes.
Once all the forward and reverse reads from the Illumina sequencer are joined one can see – in gray here – a pattern in the size of the fragments produced. Superposing in red the abundance of length variation found in the SILVAMOD database, one can see that the variation we uncovered follows closely the natural variation of the V3–V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene. As shown in Fig. 3, each of the three peaks are composed of characteristic phyla.