See also
Making an OTU
table
Cross-talk
An OTU table gives the number of reads per sample per OTU. One entry in the
table is a number of reads, also called a "count".
OTU tables
are often stored as a tabbed text files
in which samples are rows and OTUs are columns; for example, the
QIIME classic format. A notable exception is the
mothur "shared" file format which does the opposite: rows are samples
and columns are OTUs. Tables stored as tabbed text can easily be viewed and
edited in a spreadsheet program such as Excel.
Common file formats for storing OTU tables include:
QIIME
classic tabbed text
Mothur
"shared" file
BIOM v1 (JSON)
BIOM v2 (HDF5)