FANGORN: A quality-checked and publicly available database of full-length 16S-ITS-23S rRNA operon sequences

Abstract

Sequence comparison of 16S rRNA PCR amplicons is an established approach to taxonomically identify bacterial isolates and profile complex microbial communities. One potential application of recent advances in long-read sequencing technologies is to sequence entire rRNA operons and capture significantly more phylogenetic information than sequencing of the 16S rRNA (or regions thereof) alone, with the potential to increase the proportion of amplicons that can be reliably classified to lower taxonomic ranks. Here we describe FANGORN (Full-length Amplicons for the Next Generation Of rRNa analysis), a publicly available database of quality-checked 16S-ITS-23S rRNA operons, accompanied by multiple taxonomic classifications. FANGORN will aid researchers in analysis of their data and act as a standardised database to allow comparison of results between studies.