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Operational taxonomic units (OTUs)
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Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) are a practical way to group and identify organisms based on DNA sequence similarity. In microbial ecology and other fields, OTUs are used to classify organisms without needing to assign them to a specific taxonomic rank. The level of sequence similarity used to define an OTU can vary, but it is often set at 97% similarity for bacteria and archaea. OTUs enable researchers to analyze and compare diverse microbial communities without relying on traditional taxonomic classifications.
OTUs are based on similarity, where the similarity between a pair of sequences is calculated as the percentage of locations that match in a pair-wise sequence alignment.
Regardless of the sequencing …