BOL

MetaBAT, An Efficient Tool for Accurately Reconstructing Single Genomes from Complex Microbial Communities

Grouping large genomic fragments assembled from shotgun metagenomic sequences to deconvolute complex microbial communities, or metagenome binning, enables the study of individual organisms and their interactions. Here we developed an automated metagenome binning software, called MetaBAT, which integrates empirical probabilistic distances of genome abundance and tetranucleotide frequency. Tested on both synthetic and real metagenome datasets, MetaBAT outperforms alternative methods in both accuracy and computational efficiency. Applying MetaBAT to an assembly from 1,704 human gut samples formed 1,634 genome bins (>200kb) in 3 hours, where 621 genome bins are >50% complete with <5% contamination from other species. Further analysis shows that the quality of these genome bins approaches manually curated genomes.