A pile of pipelines: An overview of the bioinformatics software for metabarcoding data analyses.

Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding has gained growing attention as a strategy for monitoring biodiversity in ecology. However, taxa identifications produced through metabarcoding require sophisticated processing of high-throughput sequencing data from taxonomically informative DNA barcodes. Various sets of universal and taxon-specific primers have been developed, extending the usability of metabarcoding across archaea, bacteria and eukaryotes. Accordingly, a multitude of metabarcoding data analysis tools and pipelines have also been developed. Often, several developed workflows are designed to process the same amplicon sequencing data, making it somewhat puzzling to choose one among the plethora of existing pipelines. However, each pipeline has its own specific philosophy, strengths and limitations, which should be considered depending on the aims of any specific study, as well as the bioinformatics expertise of the user. In this review, we outline the input data requirements, supported operating systems and particular attributes of thirty-two amplicon processing pipelines with the goal of helping users to select a pipeline for their metabarcoding projects.

Perioperative management of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: A narrative review.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or motor neuron disease, is an uncommon progressive neurological disorder. Professionals working in the perioperative field may encounter patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis only rarely. The relevant published literature on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is broad in scope, but a contemporary review focused on the perioperative period is absent. This structured narrative review seeks to provide a summary of the contemporary management of patients and then focuses on eliciting if there are perioperative management considerations specific to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis that can be optimised. A comprehensive structured narrative literature review, including grey literature searching, indicated worsening ventilatory failure is of prime concern but that patients may present with a broad range of neurological symptoms, and that cardiovascular and cognitive dysfunction specific to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis may exist and be occult. Exacerbation of neuromuscular weakness during the perioperative period is multifaceted and requires the application of a high standard of the core principles of surgical and anaesthetic management of neuromuscular disease. Standard perioperative approaches require rigorous attention and potential exists for significant alteration. There is a potential high risk of postoperative increased morbidity from neurological decline and mortality from pulmonary complications. A meticulous approach to planning preoperative assessment, shared decision-making, intraoperative and postoperative care is required.