bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/538587; this version posted February 1, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-ND 4.0 International license. Title: MAUI-seq: Multiplexed, high-throughput amplicon diversity profiling using unique molecular identifiers Authors: 1* 2* 1 2 Bryden Fields and Sara Moeskjær , Ville-Petri Friman , Stig U. Andersen , and J. Peter W. Young1 *: These authors contributed equally to the work. Author affiliations: 1 Department of Biology, University of York, York, United Kingdom 2 Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark Authors for correspondence: Peter Young,
[email protected] Stig U. Andersen,
[email protected] Keywords: Amplification bias, Environmental amplicon diversity, High-throughput amplicon sequencing, Rhizobium, Unique molecular identifier 1 bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/538587; this version posted February 1, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-ND 4.0 International license. Abstract Correcting for sequencing and PCR errors is a major challenge when characterising genetic diversity using high-throughput amplicon sequencing (HTAS). Clustering amplicons by sequence similarity is a robust and frequently used approach, but it reduces sensitivity and makes it more difficult to detect differences between closely related strains. We have developed a multiplexed HTAS method, MAUI-seq, that incorporates unique molecular identifiers (UMIs) to improve correction.