In Silico Analysis and Experimental Evaluation of Primer Sets for Species Level Resolution of Vaginal Microbiota using 16S rRNA Gene Sequencing

Tools such as QIIME and the Greengenes database are commonly used for vaginal microbiome analysis. However due to the lack of regular updates to the database, compounded with the rapid discovery rate of novel bacteria, the ability to detect newly classified bacteria becomes challenging. Our objective with this study was to learn what combination of hypervariable region and patient sample and database clustering was most effective for detecting vaginal associated bacteria.