Taxonomic classifiers: Creating customised taxonomic classifiers for bioinformatic pipelines based on publicly available gene-reference databases

This documents the process of downloading and preparing reference sequence data from publicly available databases for constructing classifiers for assigning taxonomy to barcode sequence data. Here code is collated with additional original code for creating classifiers for various taxonomic groups, using different gene regions and based on reference sequences from six different genetic databases. The document is designed to be used as a modifiable general pipeline guide with all the necessary code to get started on constructing your own customised reference database.