RiboSnake – a user-friendly, robust, reproducible, multipurpose and documentation-extensive pipeline for 16S rRNA gene microbiome analysis

Background Next-generation sequencing for assaying microbial communities has become a standard technique in recent years. However, the initial investment required into in-silico analytics is still quite significant, especially for facilities not focused on bioinformatics. With the rapid decline in costs and growing adoption of sequencing-based methods in a number of fields, validated, fully automated, reproducible and yet flexible pipelines will play a greater role in various scientific fields in the future. Results We present RiboSnake, a validated, automated, reproducible QIIME2-based analysis pipeline implemented in Snakemake for the computational analysis of 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing data. The pipeline comes with pre-packaged validated parameter sets, optimized for different sample types. The sets range from complex environmental samples to patient data. The configuration packages can be easily adapted and shared, requiring minimal user input. Conclusion RiboSnake is a new alternative for researchers employing 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing and looking for a customizable and yet user-friendly pipeline for microbiome analysis with in-vitro validated settings. The complete analysis generated with a fully automated pipeline based on validated parameter sets for different sample types is a significant improvement to existing methods. The workflow repository can be found on GitHub (https://github.com/IKIM-Essen/RiboSnake).