• Journal of Applied Biological Chemistry
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• v.59 no.4
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• pp.299-304
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• 2016

When used for amplicon sequencing, Illumina platforms produce more than hundreds of sequence artefacts, which affects operational taxonomic units based analyses such as differential abundance and network analyses. Nevertheless it has become a major tool for fecal microbial community analysis. In addition, results from sequence-based fecal microbial community analysis vary depending on conditions of samples (i.e., freshness, time of storage and quantity). We investigated if freeze-drying samples could improve quality of sequence data. Our results showed reduced number of possible artefacts while maintaining overall microbial community structure. Therefore, freeze-drying feces prior to DNA extraction is recommended for Illumina-based microbial community analysis.