You got the point. The V4EXT can become the platinum standard ;)

Also allows you to assess better how deep your MGs need to be. If you are working in an underexplored or highly variable habitat, it's hard to tell otherwise. Better 12€ and a few weeks for amplicons, than hundreds of € for depth you didn't need.

With the amount of contaminated and mixed up samples, or experiment gone wrong I've seen over 7 years and literally over 1000 amplicon sequencing projects I personally inspected for data quality, trust me, it's money well spent and responsible grant money handling to amplicon screen first.

While I see where the idea comes from, running a microbiome sequencing facility clearly shows it isn't. The overwhelming majority of projects is amplicon sequencing.
Also, genuinely, with our approach running amplicons before metagenomes costs 12€.

Organizer Thilo Hofmann @cemess.bsky.social, contributions from 30+ @univie.ac.at scientists, incl @michiwagner4.bsky.social, @christinakaiser.bsky.social, Stephan Krämer, @jillianmpetersen.bsky.social, @ppjevac.bsky.social, @andreasrichter.bsky.social, and @loutsi.bsky.social from our cluster.