(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.
