Quantifying uncertainty of taxonomic placement in DNA barcoding and metabarcoding

O_LIA crucial step in the use of DNA markers for biodiversity surveys is the assignment of Linnaean taxonomies (species, genus, etc.) to sequence reads. This allows the use of all the information known based on the taxonomic names. Taxonomic placement of DNA barcoding sequences is inherently probabilistic because DNA sequences contain errors, because there is natural variation among sequences within a species, and because reference databases are incomplete and can have false annotations. However, most existing bioinformatics methods for taxonomic placement either exclude uncertainty, or quantify it using metrics other than probability.\nC_LIO_LIIn this paper we evaluate the performance of a