Hi all!
I am very curious what do you think about the problem I am going to write about. Do you agree, disagree?
Illumina company have released new metagenomic report which include a lot of species. The previous report didn't include much of it. Mostly they were focused on assigning reads to genus level taxonomy.
In my opinion adding extra species discovery doesn't make any sense. Here is why:
--> the differences between sequences at species taxonomy is very low, probably at the same level as sequencing errors
---> the probability that discovered species occur my sample is very small, so what is the point of doing that?
In my opinion NGS technology is very useful for metagenomic analysis but only to genus taxonomy level (with very good read coverage and quality).
The only reason that I would think about to do extra species discovery is because a lot of clients just wanted that, just like my boss wants :) And I am trying to explain that it doesn't make biological sense ...but if Illumina has it, why we cannot!
So I am wondering what do you think about that? Mayby there is something I am missing ...
I tried to contact with Illumina to ask this question but since now I don't have any reply.
Best,
Agata
