Taxonomic classification Tools

Program for the taxonomic assignment of high-throughput sequencing reads, e.g., Illumina or Roche/454, from whole-genome sequencing of metagenomic DNA. Reads are directly assigned to taxa using the NCBI taxonomy and a reference database of protein sequences from Bacteria, Archaea, Fungi, microbial eukaryotes and viruses.

Kraken 2 is the newest version of Kraken, a taxonomic classification system using exact k-mer matches to achieve high accuracy and fast classification speeds. This classifier matches each k-mer within a query sequence to the lowest common ancestor (LCA) of all genomes containing the given k-mer. The k-mer assignments inform the classification algorithm. Any assumption that Kraken’s raw read assignments can be directly translated into species or strain-level abundance estimates is flawed. Bracken (Bayesian Reestimation of Abundance after Classification with KrakEN), estimates species abundances in metagenomics samples by probabilistically re-distributing reads in the taxonomic tree. (Lu, Jennifer et al. “Bracken: estimating species abundance in metagenomics data.”)

KrakenTools is a suite of scripts to be used alongside the Kraken, KrakenUniq, Kraken 2, or Bracken programs. These scripts are designed to help Kraken users with downstream analysis of Kraken results.