How does eDNA decay affect metabarcoding experiments?

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.

Dose-response analysis can be carried out using multi-purpose commercial statistical software, but except for a few special cases the analysis easily becomes cumbersome as relevant, non-standard output requires manual programming. The extension package drc for the statistical environment R provides a flexible and versatile infrastructure for dose-response analyses in general. The present version of the package, reflecting extensions and modifications over the last decade, provides a user-friendly interface to specify the model assumptions about the dose-response relationship and comes with a number of extractors for summarizing fitted models and carrying out inference on derived parameters. The aim of the present paper is to provide an overview of state-of-the-art dose-response analysis, both in terms of general concepts that have evolved and matured over the years and by means of concrete examples.