BlastCuratoR is an R package designed to standardize the curation of taxonomic annotations from metabarcoding marker-gene BLAST results.
When running BLAST against a reference database, each query often returns multiple hits that vary in percent identity, E-value, bitscore, and other metrics. Directly adopting the top hit’s species-level assignment can lead to overconfident or erroneous annotations. BlastCuratoR applies a set of rules and confidence thresholds to perform automated curation of the taxonomy annotation results.
Currently, threshold are focused on eukaryotic rRNA, with a special emphasis on fungal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region.