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UCHIME algorithm

See also
  Chimera formation
  UCHIME order dependency
  Reproducibility of results
  Comparison of UCHIME and DECIPHER
  Downloads

UCHIME and UCHIME2 are algorithms for detecting chimeric sequences. See the UCHIME and UCHIME2 papers for details. Note that the accuracy results reported in the original UCHIME paper are highly over-optimistic due to unrelaistic benchmark design. This is explained in the UCHIME2 paper.

Stand-alone UCHIME[2] should not be used in OTU clustering or denoising pipelines because the cluster_otus and unoise3 commands have more effective chimera filters integrated into the algorithms. You will probably get much higher error rates, both false positives and false negatives, if you use UCHIME[2] as a stand-alone filtering step.