QIIME: Better Described as EMSAP?

Abstract

The software described as QIIME (quantitative insights into microbial ecology) is being used widely for the analysis of molecular sequences recovered from microbial assemblages (http://qiime.org/). As an example of this wide use, there have been 144 citations including this term in ASM full-text articles (as of 24 November 2014) and approx. 93,000 hits in Google. This 16s rRNA-based approach (J. Caporaso et al., Nature Methods 7:335–336, 2010) “allows analysis of high-throughput community sequencing data,” including particularly the assessment of “diversity.”