DySC: Software for greedy clustering of 16S rRNA reads

Abstract

Summary: Pyrosequencing technologies are frequently used for sequencing the 16S ribosomal RNA marker gene for profiling microbial communities. Clustering of the produced reads is an important but time-consuming task. We present Dynamic Seed-based Clustering (DySC), a new tool based on the greedy clustering approach that uses a dynamic seeding strategy. Evaluations based on the normalized mutual information (NMI) criterion show that DySC produces higher quality clusters than UCLUST and CD-HIT at a comparable runtime. © The Author (2012). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.