| USEARCH manual > algorithms > OTU clustering |
| Defining OTUs |
| See also SSU metagenomics 16S OTUs Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) In traditional numerical taxonomy (Sokal and Sneath, 1963; Sneath and Sokal, 1973), an Operational Taxonomic Unit (OTU) is a term that means "the thing(s) being studied". The definition is intentionally vague. The "thing(s)" could be an individual organism, a named taxonomic group such as a species or genus, or a group with undetermined evolutionary relationships that share a given set of observed characters. It is up to a scientist to specify and justify his or her definition of OTUs in the context of a particular study. References |