Darling Aaron

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Darling
First Name
Aaron
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  • Article
    DESMAN : a new tool for de novo extraction of strains from metagenomes
    (BioMed Central, 2017-09-21) Quince, Christopher ; Delmont, Tom O. ; Raguideau, Sébastien ; Alneberg, Johannes ; Darling, Aaron ; Collins, Gavin ; Eren, A. Murat
    We introduce DESMAN for De novo Extraction of Strains from Metagenomes. Large multi-sample metagenomes are being generated but strain variation results in fragmentary co-assemblies. Current algorithms can bin contigs into metagenome-assembled genomes but are unable to resolve strain-level variation. DESMAN identifies variants in core genes and uses co-occurrence across samples to link variants into haplotypes and abundance profiles. These are then searched for against non-core genes to determine the accessory genome of each strain. We validated DESMAN on a complex 50-species 210-genome 96-sample synthetic mock data set and then applied it to the Tara Oceans microbiome.
  • Article
    Insights into the phylogeny and coding potential of microbial dark matter
    (Nature Publishing Group, 2013-07-14) Rinke, Christian ; Schwientek, Patrick ; Sczyrba, Alexander ; Ivanova, Natalia N. ; Anderson, Iain J. ; Cheng, Jan-Fang ; Darling, Aaron ; Malfatti, Stephanie A. ; Swan, Brandon K. ; Gies, Esther A. ; Dodsworth, Jeremy A. ; Hedlund, Brian P. ; Tsiamis, Georgios ; Sievert, Stefan M. ; Liu, Wen-Tso ; Eisen, Jonathan A. ; Hallam, Steven J. ; Kyrpides, Nikos C. ; Stepanauskas, Ramunas ; Rubin, Edward M. ; Hugenholtz, Philip ; Woyke, Tanja
    Genome sequencing enhances our understanding of the biological world by providing blueprints for the evolutionary and functional diversity that shapes the biosphere. However, microbial genomes that are currently available are of limited phylogenetic breadth, owing to our historical inability to cultivate most microorganisms in the laboratory. We apply single-cell genomics to target and sequence 201 uncultivated archaeal and bacterial cells from nine diverse habitats belonging to 29 major mostly uncharted branches of the tree of life, so-called ‘microbial dark matter’. With this additional genomic information, we are able to resolve many intra- and inter-phylum-level relationships and to propose two new superphyla. We uncover unexpected metabolic features that extend our understanding of biology and challenge established boundaries between the three domains of life. These include a novel amino acid use for the opal stop codon, an archaeal-type purine synthesis in Bacteria and complete sigma factors in Archaea similar to those in Bacteria. The single-cell genomes also served to phylogenetically anchor up to 20% of metagenomic reads in some habitats, facilitating organism-level interpretation of ecosystem function. This study greatly expands the genomic representation of the tree of life and provides a systematic step towards a better understanding of biological evolution on our planet.