Holm, J. B.; Gajer, P.; Ravel, J.

Clustering of sequences into operational taxonomic units (OTUs) and denoising methods are a mainstream stopgap totaxonomically classifying large numbers of 16S rRNA gene sequences. We developed speciateIT, a novel taxonomic classification tool which rapidly and accurately classifies individual amplicon sequences (https://github.com/Ravel-Laboratory/speciateIT). Environment-specific reference databases generally yield optimal taxonomic assignment. To this end, we also present vSpeciateDB, a custom reference database for the taxonomic classification of 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequences from vaginal microbiota. Weshow that speciateIT requires minimal computational resources relative to other algorithms and, when combined with vSpeciateDB, affords accurate species level classification in an environment-specific manner.