Kaiju or MetaPhlAn2?

Question

[shibl_a]

A question for those who have experience with metagenomic datasets...which of those two tools would you prefer to use with a metagenomic dataset derived from a seawater sample in terms of reliability and more accurate representation of the taxa..?? Thanks!

[Nitin Narwade]

I think you can not rely on a single tool, in this case, I would suggest you can use multiple tools and check the results and then decide. Because the problem for all these tools (Kaiju, MetaPhlAn2 or Kraken) is, all of them will assign taxonomy on the basis of reference dataset.

I think MetaPhlAn2 will use their own marker gene set whereas Kraken and Kaiju will use NCBI nrdb (kaiju = protein nrdb and Kraken nucleotide nrdb).

In this case, as your samples are from seawater, then either Kraken or kaiju would be a good choice, because of the reference database(I think).