1. Bacteria comprise the most diverse domain of life on Earth, where they occupy nearly every possible ecological niche and play key roles in biological and chemical processes. Studying the composition and ecology of bacterial ecosystems and understanding their function are of prime importance. High‐throughput sequencing technologies enable nearly comprehensive descriptions of bacterial diversity through 16S ribosomal RNA gene amplicons. Analyses of these communities generally rely upon taxonomic assignments through reference data bases or clustering approaches using de facto sequence similarity thresholds to identify operational taxonomic units. However, these methods often fail to resolve ecologically meaningful differences between closely related organisms in complex microbial data sets.
2. In this paper, we describe oligotyping, a novel supervised computational method that allows researchers to investigate the diversity of closely related but distinct bacterial organisms in final operational taxonomic units identified in environmental data sets through 16S ribosomal RNA gene data by the canonical approaches.
3. Our analysis of two data sets from two different environments demonstrates the capacity of oligotyping at discriminating distinct microbial populations of ecological importance.
4. Oligotyping can resolve the distribution of closely related organisms across environments and unveil previously overlooked ecological patterns for microbial communities. The URL http://oligotyping.org offers an open‐source software pipeline for oligotyping.

中文翻译：

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寡分型：使用 16S rRNA 基因数据区分密切相关的微生物分类群。

1. 细菌构成了地球上最多样化的生命领域，它们占据了几乎所有可能的生态位，并在生物和化学过程中发挥着关键作用。研究细菌生态系统的组成和生态并了解它们的功能至关重要。高通量测序技术可以通过 16S 核糖体 RNA 基因扩增子对细菌多样性进行近乎全面的描述。这些群落的分析通常依赖于通过参考数据库或聚类方法进行的分类分配，使用事实上的序列相似性阈值来识别操作分类单元。然而，这些方法通常无法解决复杂微生物数据集中密切相关的生物之间具有生态意义的差异。
2. 在本文中，我们描述了寡分型，这是一种新的有监督的计算方法，它允许研究人员通过规范方法通过 16S 核糖体 RNA 基因数据在环境数据集中确定的最终操作分类单元中研究密切相关但不同的细菌生物的多样性。
3. 我们对来自两个不同环境的两个数据集的分析证明了寡分型在区分具有生态重要性的不同微生物种群方面的能力。
4. Oligotyping 可以解决密切相关的生物在环境中的分布，并揭示以前被忽视的微生物群落生态模式。URL http://oligotyping.org 提供了一个用于寡头分析的开源软件管道。