|bio method=Primer removal, Sequence trimming, Sequencing quality control,

|bio tech=454

|created by=Ram Vinay Pandey, Viola Nolte, and Christian Schlötterer

|maintained=Yes

}}

We developed CANGS (Cleaning and Analyzing Next Generation Sequences) a flexible and user-friendly integrated software utility: CANGS is designed for amplicon based biodiversity surveys using the 454 sequencing platform. CANGS filters low quality sequences, removes PCR primers, filters singletons, identifies barcodes, and generates input files for downstream analyses. The downstream analyses rely either on third party software (e.g.: rarefaction analyses) or CANGS-specific scripts. The latter include modules linking 454 sequences with the name of the closest taxonomic reference retrieved from the NCBI database and the sequence divergence between them. Our software can be easily adapted to handle sequencing projects with different amplicon sizes, primer sequences, and quality thresholds, which makes this software especially useful for non-bioinformaticians.