Taxonomic profiling all the way

Taxonomic profiling is a technique to classify the genetic sequencing reads in a metagenomic sample. It is a particularly common approach to study microbial communities in diverse ecosystems (microbiomes) by comparing the sequencing reads to libraries of known genomes. Due to the nature of metagenomic samples, for which a ground truth does not exist, many competing techniques have sprung up to perform the classification task. Each approach has its own advantages and drawbacks and it is currently impossible to assess a “best” one. The poster shows an application of the community-developed nf-core/taxprofiler pipeline. The taxprofiler nextflow pipeline addresses the bias present in the various profilers by making a wide range of different approaches very accessible. It is therefore feasible to contrast and compare results from those profilers by running them in parallel and at scale by virtue of the nextflow workflow manager. The application consists of a demonstration of the analysis of raw metagenomic short- and long-read sequencing data all the way to statistical analysis and visualisation in R.