- The document describes testing various bioinformatics tools wrapped in the Metapy analysis software for metabarcoding of Phytophthora species, including Bowtie, Swarm, CD-HIT, DADA2, BLASTCLUST, and VSEARCH.
- Control mixes with known Phytophthora species were analyzed to determine sensitivity, precision, false discovery and negative rates. No single tool performed best across all metrics. Bowtie had the highest accuracy due to reliance on a reference database, while Swarm had a low false positive rate.
- Error rates were examined using synthetic DNA controls which showed most variation was within 1-2 mismatches of the original sequences, suggesting thresholds less than 3 mismatches are needed.