About Taxonomic Classifiers

Taxonomic classifiers perform a fuzzy search between input sequences and reference databases. A classic use-case is determining the relative abundance of a microbiome sample.

If you only need relative abundance, you can use a taxonomic profiler that simply returns relative abundance. For a more detailed view, you can use a classifier like Kraken 2.

Toolchest hosts both the taxonomic classifier and the corresponding reference databases, and you can also use your own custom database.

Typically, taxonomic classifiers are more efficient than aligners for taxonomic classification, but most are based on heuristic methods rather than optimal alignment scores. If you're looking for something more analogous to BLAST, check out aligners.

If you want to use a taxonomic classifier that's not listed here, let us know! It might even be already available on our infrastructure but not listed.