TAG.ME: Taxonomic Assignment of Genetic Markers for Ecology

Here we present TAG.ME, a novel alignment-independent and amplicon-specific method for taxonomic assignment based on genetic markers (http://gabrielrfernandes.github.io/tagme/). TAG.ME uses a multilevel supervised learning approach to efficiently assign taxonomy based on user-defined genetic marker genes. We applied our method to assess gut and soil sample diversity and showed it outperforms alternative approaches, identifying a larger proportion of species.