Welcome to the website for the mothur project, initiated by Dr. Patrick Schloss and his software development team in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at The University of Michigan. This project seeks to develop a single piece of open-source, expandable software to fill the bioinformatics needs of the microbial ecology community. We have incorporated the functionality of dotur, sons, treeclimber, s-libshuff, unifrac, and much more. In addition to improving the flexibility of these algorithms, we have added a number of other features including calculators and visualization tools. If you would like to contribute code to the project feel free to download the source code and make your own improvements. Alternatively, if you have an idea or a need, but lack the programming expertise, let us know and we'll add it to the queue of features we would like to add. Our current goal is to release a new iteration of the project monthly.

  • Download mothur - If you want a copy of mothur, this is the link for you. But first, you must be a registered wiki user and be logged in so that we can inform you of any important updates.
  • Peruse the mothur manual - Feel free to take a look around at what mothur can do for you. Don't worry, it won't tell you to wash behind your ears. Once you've registered, feel free to add or edit content in the manual.
  • Keep up to date on future workshops - Dr. Schloss offers several workshops a year covering mothur and R