Hi everyone,
I am a freshman about mothur and sequence analysis. Now I was confused the mock community during the assessing error rates. What is mock community and how could I get mock community? Please give me more details as more as possible.
Thank you!
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The mock community is a sample containing known 16S rRNA sequences which you amplify and sequencing alongside your ‘real’ samples. Because you know exactly what these sequences are you can compare the sequences obtained in your amplicon sample to the real sequences and calculate how divergent they are. This provides you with information on the overall quality of your sequence data and essentially lets you know how well your sequencing run went.
You can make your own from a mixture of pure cultures or purchase them from suppliers like BEI - https://www.beiresources.org/Catalog/otherProducts/HM-782D.aspx
Really appreciate your help. According my personal understand, mock community is just like a control sample,and we have known what is that before sequencing. We need the result of sequencing to compare with the control sample and calculate how divergent they are. Is that right?
Yep, exactly.