Parsing output of .cons.tax.summary

Hello,

How do I interpret the output from .cons.tax.summary? I would like to get the seq counts for all for all my samples at the family level. I have used the count file all throughout out so my outputted .cons.tax.summary is equivalent to the MiSEQ SOP tutoiral. I assumed that taxlevel, in the outputted files, corresponded to the 6 tax levels I know of. However, there are a total of 19 taxlevels and I don’t know how to interpret that. I’ve tried to google the taxons to understand it seems that things are a bit all over the place - for example Fungi and a kingdom, but Alveolata are a superphylum and Virdiplantae are a phlyum? I don’t know what to do with this downstream… I was kind hoping that everything with taxlevel rank 2 would represent the same thing (i.e Kingdom, or Phylum).

Does anyone have any suggestions? As I am new to this type of analysis, I’ve stuck with all the default parameters suggested in the MiSeq tuotiral. As you can also tell I am looking at 18S data, I’ve used the silva.eukaya downloads that I got off the MOTHUR site as my input files.

Here’s and example of my output (ignore the rightmost column, that’s just from the R data frame) of just the taxa information.

     taxlevel rankID         taxon daughterlevels
3           2  0.1.1     Alveolata              4
219         2  0.1.2     Amoebozoa              1
237         2  0.1.3   Cryptophyta              3
367         2  0.1.4    Euglenozoa              1
399         2  0.1.5         Fungi              3
792         2  0.1.6       Metazoa              8
1111        2  0.1.7 Viridiplantae              3
1479        2  0.1.8 stramenopiles              5
1640        2  0.1.9  unclassified              1

How do I interpret the output from .cons.tax.summary? I would like to get the seq counts for all for all my samples at the family level. I have used the count file all throughout out so my outputted .cons.tax.summary is equivalent to the MiSEQ SOP tutoiral. I assumed that taxlevel, in the outputted files, corresponded to the 6 tax levels I know of. However, there are a total of 19 taxlevels and I don’t know how to interpret that. I’ve tried to google the taxons to understand it seems that things are a bit all over the place - for example Fungi and a kingdom, but Alveolata are a superphylum and Virdiplantae are a phlyum? I don’t know what to do with this downstream… I was kind hoping that everything with taxlevel rank 2 would represent the same thing (i.e Kingdom, or Phylum).

This is a problem with the eukaryotic taxonomy from SILVA not conforming to the Linnean system that you are anticipating. The summary file is described at Redirecting…

What do folks do to get around this issue? I really need a taxonomy that uses the Linnaean system. Thanks for any suggestions!