NBC: the Naïve Bayes Classification tool webserver for taxonomic classification of metagenomic reads

• Published in: Bioinformatics Vol. 27; no. 1; pp. 127 - 129
• Main Authors: Rosen, Gail L., Reichenberger, Erin R., Rosenfeld, Aaron M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Oxford University Press 01.01.2011; International Society for Computational Biology - Oxford University Press
• Subjects: Algorithms; Applications Note; BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES; Bayes Theorem; Biochemistry & Molecular Biology; Biological and medical sciences; Biotechnology & Applied Microbiology; Computer Science; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; General aspects; High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing; Internet; Mathematical & Computational Biology; Mathematics; Mathematics in biology. Statistical analysis. Models. Metrology. Data processing in biology (general aspects); Metagenomics - methods; Phylogeny; Software; Metagenome; Classification
• ISSN: 1367-4803; 1367-4811; 1460-2059; 1367-4811
• DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btq619

Motivation: Datasets from high-throughput sequencing technologies have yielded a vast amount of data about organisms in environmental samples. Yet, it is still a challenge to assess the exact organism content in these samples because the task of taxonomic classification is too computationally complex to annotate all reads in a dataset. An easy-to-use webserver is needed to process these reads. While many methods exist, only a few are publicly available on webservers, and out of those, most do not annotate all reads. Results: We introduce a webserver that implements the naïve Bayes classifier (NBC) to classify all metagenomic reads to their best taxonomic match. Results indicate that NBC can assign next-generation sequencing reads to their taxonomic classification and can find significant populations of genera that other classifiers may miss. Availability: Publicly available at: http://nbc.ece.drexel.edu. Contact: gailr@ece.drexel.edu