ZymoBIOMICS™ Microbial Community DNA Standard by Zymo Research

"I use the ZymoBIOMICS Microbial DNA Standard as a separate sample during my 16S rRNA gene library preparation and sequencing experiments. The DNA standard contains a known amount of eight bacterial and two fungal species genomes to assess the performance of the microbiome pipelines from the very beginning until the data analysis step. It is very straightforward to use, and I have obtained accurate and reproducible results so far. I have also used this for optimizing PCR experiments, obtaining good results as well. Just a 'heads-up' for new users: when performing taxonomic assignation of the amplicon sequence variants obtained from the DNA Standard sample, double-check your results with more than a single 16S rRNA gene database in case you are missing any of the microbial species contained in the DNA Standard. I was using the Human Oral Microbiome Database (HOMD) for assigning taxonomy and I was missing Salmonella enterica on the DNA Standard sample. I double-checked the non-assigned (NA) amplicon sequence variants using standard nucleotide blast against the nucleotide collection database from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and, indeed, they were assigned to S. enterica."