Anacapa Toolkit: an environmental DNA toolkit for processing multilocus metabarcode datasets

1. Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding is a promising method to monitor species and community diversity that is rapid, affordable, and non-invasive. Longstanding needs of the eDNA community are modular informatics tools, comprehensive and customizable reference databases, flexibility across high-throughput sequencing platforms, fast multilocus metabarcode processing, and accurate taxonomic assignment. As bioinformatics tools continue to improve, addressing each of these demands within a single bioinformatics toolkit is becoming a reality. 2. Here we present an open access modular metabarcode sequence toolkit, Anacapa (https://github.com/limey-bean/Anacapa/), that addresses the above needs, allowing users to build comprehensive reference databases and process raw multilocus metabarcode sequence data to accurately characterize communities. A novel aspect of Anacapa is our database builder, Creating Reference libraries Using eXisting tools (CRUX), that generates comprehensive reference ...