Recovery of genomes from metagenomes via a dereplication, aggregation and scoring strategy

Nat Microbiol. 2018 Jul;3(7):836-843. doi: 10.1038/s41564-018-0171-1. Epub 2018 May 28.

Abstract

Microbial communities are critical to ecosystem function. A key objective of metagenomic studies is to analyse organism-specific metabolic pathways and reconstruct community interaction networks. This requires accurate assignment of assembled genome fragments to genomes. Existing binning methods often fail to reconstruct a reasonable number of genomes and report many bins of low quality and completeness. Furthermore, the performance of existing algorithms varies between samples and biotopes. Here, we present a dereplication, aggregation and scoring strategy, DAS Tool, that combines the strengths of a flexible set of established binning algorithms. DAS Tool applied to a constructed community generated more accurate bins than any automated method. Indeed, when applied to environmental and host-associated samples of different complexity, DAS Tool recovered substantially more near-complete genomes, including previously unreported lineages, than any single binning method alone. The ability to reconstruct many near-complete genomes from metagenomics data will greatly advance genome-centric analyses of ecosystems.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Animals
  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Data Curation
  • Gastrointestinal Microbiome
  • Genome, Bacterial
  • Humans
  • Metagenomics / methods*
  • Microbiota
  • Soil Microbiology
  • User-Computer Interface
  • Water Microbiology