Linear schematic of the basic quality control procedure for marker gene (microbiome) data. Linear schematic of the basic quality control procedure for marker gene (microbiome) data. The process flows from removing known technical artifacts, to assembling short contiguous regions, to trimming remaining contamination poststitching and creating a final set (or optionally, single pooled file) of sequences in the desired format (FASTA or FASTQ). Notable exceptions to this procedure exist: for instance, pairs may not be stitchable depending on the insert size for shotgun sequencing. Gabriel A. Al-Ghalith et al. mSystems 2018; doi:10.1128/mSystems.00202-17