Background

The 16S rRNA gene has several properties that make it ideally suited for our purposes

1. Present in all prokaryotes

2. Highly conserved + highly variable regions

3. Huge reference databases

The highly conserved regions make it easy to target the gene across different organisms, while the highly variable regions allow us to distinguish between different species.

(slide credit https://www.slideshare.net/beiko/ccbc-tutorial-beiko)