Stress-sensitive neural circuits change the gut microbiome via duodenal glands

We present DADA2, a software package that models and corrects Illumina-sequenced amplicon errors. DADA2 infers sample sequences exactly, without coarse-graining into OTUs, and resolves differences of as little as one nucleotide. In several mock communities DADA2 identified more real variants and output fewer spurious sequences than other methods. We applied DADA2 to vaginal samples from a cohort of pregnant women, revealing a diversity of previously undetected Lactobacillus crispatus variants.

This study describes and validates a new method for metagenomic biomarker discovery by way of class comparison, tests of biological consistency and effect size estimation. This addresses the challenge of finding organisms, genes, or pathways that consistently explain the differences between two or more microbial communities, which is a central problem to the study of metagenomics. We extensively validate our method on several microbiomes and a convenient online interface for the method is provided at http://huttenhower.sph.harvard.edu/lefse/.