PC recommendations for metagenomics

[rahbz]

I am new to the field of metagenomics, can you please recommend me the minimum requirements of a desktop to carry out the analysis. Such as QIIME and other tools.

Thanks,

[RickBioinf]

Depends on what kind of metagenomics you are carrying out, whole genome or 16S?

[rahbz]

its 16s
not the whole genome,

[RickBioinf]

With 16S I'd recommend firstly looking at an alignment tool, the alignment tool can be the hardest one to figure out. There are alot and they all have their benefits.

QIIME has (close to) all the needed tools for 16S in it. If, and i mean IF, you can install it on your pc it's worth it.

[rahbz]

yah, thanks for the information
I need to provide the minimum system requirements for my work to proceed.

Thanking you,

[rhinoceros]

yah, thanks for the information
I need to provide the minimum system requirements for my work to proceed.

Thanking you,

Any computer will do. Of course, if you don't want to wait for days/months/weeks/years, a faster one will do better. I've been running 16S stuff with QIIME on 15" rMBP (quadcore 2.7GHz i7, 16 GB RAM) and found that in general analyses will not take longer than a day (everybody in our bioinfo team has this laptop). Of course sample size and the exact steps you take affect this enormously. For other things, I use a cluster with 352 physical cores and ~10 TB RAM. Even on it, some stuff can easily run for many days..