Where to start?

I am a beginner, and I want to use Mothur for the first time! My goal is to give my dataset to mothur, (a datafile containing 10000 sequences) and find the clusters!

I have been searching the website for a tutorial on how to basically do the required steps, reading in the data, preprocess and calculate the distances, and finally fo the clusters! On the wiki page, I see that there is a section on OTU-based approaches (http://www.mothur.org/wiki/OTU-based_approaches) which has lots of commands, and cluster is one of them, but I need to know where to start!

I think I need to learn the basics stuff, such as how does mothur, how to read the files, and the steps to cluster sequences!

Any help is much appreciated!

Welcome to the mothur community! Pat has created a few example analysis’s that you may find helpful:

http://www.mothur.org/wiki/454_SOP
http://www.mothur.org/wiki/MiSeq_SOP

Also, here are some other helpful links to get you started:

http://www.mothur.org/wiki/Silva_reference_files
http://www.mothur.org/wiki/Lookup_files
http://www.mothur.org/wiki/RDP_reference_files
http://www.mothur.org/wiki/Frequently_asked_questions