Benchmarking fungal species classification using Oxford Nanopore Technologies long-read ITS metabarcodes

Abstract

The gold standard for fungal classification has long been specimen or culture-based, however, many Fungi display simple morphological characteristics, or are unculturable by current methods. Using DNA metabarcodes, many taxa can be identified from a single sample simultaneously, but annotating these sequences with species-level taxonomy often requires more information than short-read sequences afford. Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) long-read sequencing has achieved species-level resolution in metabarcoding of bacteria and invertebrates, but the application of this technology has not been extensively benchmarked for Fungi. In this work, we use a mock community of real ONT long-read metaba..