The uses of ASVs include classifying groups of species based on DNA sequences, finding biological and environmental variation, and determining ecological patterns.
ASV methods on the other hand are able to resolve sequence differences by as little as a single nucleotide change, thus avoiding similarity-based operational clustering units altogether.
ASVs are also referred to as exact sequence variants (ESVs), zero-radius OTUs (ZOTUs), sub-OTUs (sOTUs), haplotypes, or oligotypes.
In one research study, Glassman and Martiny confirmed the suitability of OTUs for investigating broad-scale ecological diversity.
By contrast, since OTUs depend on the specifics of the similarity thresholds used to generate them, the units within any OTU can vary across researchers, experiments, and databases.
This compares ASVs and OTUs. This chart provides a check mark in regards to whether or not that marker-gene analysis method is precise, traceable, reproducible, or comprehensive.
This graph shows a real sequence that was sequenced over a hundred times. The black dots are called the error cloud, with the Y-axis being how many types that specific error showed up in this set. The red vertical line represents the 3% cut-off, that means everything to the right of this line is new biology and everything to the left is an error. This demonstrates the errors or new biology that can be missed when using OTUs, since OTUs will include these in the 3% dissimilarity threshold.
This is the same real sequence that was sequenced over a hundred times as the above graph. The black dots are called the error cloud, with the Y-axis being how many types that specific error showed up in this set. Now this diagram shows how ASVs prevent these errors associated with OTUs from being included in the data set because ASVs limit the errors to being below the black curved line and new biology being those dots above the curved black line. This means that ASVs are more exact in measuring differences among sequences.
This visually demonstrates how OTUs pick up erroneous amplicon reads created from PCR and sequencing. When these sequences are amplified into clustered units, these errors are pick-up and placed into clustered units. OTUs therefore pick up a wider set of data points and have the potential to accidentally group two distinct DNA sequences into the same unit as seen by only two colors or DNA sequences being picked up into OTUs instead of four colors (DNA sequences).
This visually shows how ASVs remove and correct errors from PCR, when compared to the OTU diagram above. ASVs are able to create groups for all four colors or DNA sequences observed. This allows ASVs to be more precise in finding sequence variation
