Terms and Definitions

CosmosID-HUB provides a platform to upload, process, and manage your metagenomic samples. To help you understand how our bioinformatics analysis works we will define a few terms.


k-mer	nucleotide sequence of a certain length. It is common in genomics to select all possible kmers of a fixed length for each read in a sample.
WGS	whole genome shotgun sequencing - with this method of DNA sequencing, all microbial DNA in the sample is fragmented into small pieces for next-generation sequencing.
Shotgun Metagenomics	using wgs sequencing as described above, the CosmosID algorithms identify microorganisms based on the entire genomes of the organisms that are in our database
Amplicon/16S/ITS	unlike shotgun metagenomics, amplicon sequencing analysis looks only at the relevant conserved ribosomal RNA gene or genes, not the entire genome for identification. 16S rRNA gene is used for Bacterial identification, while ITS (internal transcribed spacer) is used for Fungi identification.