CONSTAX

CONSTAX generates consensus taxonomic assignments for environmental fungal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) sequences to improve taxonomic resolution in high-throughput sequence-based microbiome studies.

Key Features:

• Consensus taxonomy generation: Merges independent classifier outputs to produce a single consensus taxonomy for ITS-derived OTUs.
• Classifier integration: Integrates and compares taxonomic outputs from RDP Classifier, UTAX, and SINTAX.
• OTU-level assignment: Performs taxonomic assignment in the context of operational taxonomic units (OTUs) derived from ITS sequences.
• Increased classification power and consistency: Leverages multiple classifiers to increase the proportion of assigned OTUs at given taxonomic ranks and reduce discordant assignments across tools.
• Summary classification outputs: Produces summary outputs intended for downstream ecological and functional analyses.

Scientific Applications:

• Fungal ITS taxonomic assignment: Assigns taxonomy to environmental fungal ITS sequences clustered as OTUs.
• Fungal community studies: Improves taxonomic resolution for community composition analyses from high-throughput sequencing datasets.
• Downstream ecological and functional inference: Provides classification summaries to support further biological interpretation and functional analysis of microbial communities.

Methodology:

Merges and compares taxonomic outputs from RDP Classifier, UTAX, and SINTAX to produce a consensus taxonomy and summary classification outputs for OTU-classified fungal ITS sequences.