BASTA - Taxonomic classification of sequences and sequence bins using last common ancestor estimations

Identification of the taxonomic origin of a DNA sequence is crucial for many sequencing projects, e.g. metagenomics studies, identification of contaminations in whole genome sequencing projects and filtering of organisms of interest in marker-gene based community analyses. Last common ancestor algorithms are powerful approaches to estimate the taxonomy of a given sequence and have been widely used for classification of next-generation sequencing (NGS) reads, also known as 2nd generation sequencing reads. Here, we present BASTA (), a basic sequence taxonomy annotator, which extends last common ancestor estimations from sequencing reads to any kind of nucleotide or amino acid sequence utilizing NCBI taxonomies of user-defined best hits. BASTA can be configured to use the output of many common sequence comparison tools, e.g. BLAST and Diamond, in conjunction with either provided or user-defined target sequence databases.