RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 UNCROSS: Filtering of high-frequency cross-talk in 16S amplicon reads JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 088666 DO 10.1101/088666 A1 Robert C. Edgar YR 2016 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/11/19/088666.abstract AB Next-generation amplicon sequencing is widely used for surveying biological diversity in applications such as microbial metagenomics, immune system repertoire analysis and targeted tumor sequencing of cancer-associated genes. In such studies, assignment of reads to incorrect samples (cross-talk) is a well-documented problem that is rarely considered in practice. By considering unexpected OTUs in artificial (mock) samples, I estimate that cross-talk occurred for ~2% of the reads in one Illumina GAIIx run and eleven Illumina MiSeq runs targeting 16S ribosomal RNA. I also describe UNCROSS, an algorithm for detecting and filtering cross-talk in OTU tables.