Manual at http://spades.bioinf.spbau.ru/release3.7.1/manual.html

Address of the bookmark: http://bioinf.spbau.ru/spades

Cleaning your data in this way is often required: Reads from small-RNA sequencing contain the 3’ sequencing adapter because the read is longer than the molecule that is sequenced. Amplicon reads start with a primer sequence. Poly-A tails are useful for pulling out RNA from your sample, but often you don’t want them to be in your reads.

Cutadapt helps with these trimming tasks by finding the adapter or primer sequences in an error-tolerant way. It can also modify and filter reads in various ways. Adapter sequences can contain IUPAC wildcard characters. Also, paired-end reads and even colorspace data is supported. If you want, you can also just demultiplex your input data, without removing adapter sequences at all.

Cutadapt comes with an extensive suite of automated tests and is available under the terms of the MIT license.

If you use cutadapt, please cite DOI:10.14806/ej.17.1.200 .

Address of the bookmark: https://cutadapt.readthedocs.io/en/stable/installation.html#quickstart

Wgsim is a small tool for simulating sequence reads from a reference genome. It is able to simulate diploid genomes with SNPs and insertion/deletion (INDEL) polymorphisms, and simulate reads with uniform substitution sequencing errors. It does not generate INDEL sequencing errors, but this can be partly compensated by simulating INDEL polymorphisms.

Wgsim outputs the simulated polymorphisms, and writes the true read coordinates as well as the number of polymorphisms and sequencing errors in read names. One can evaluate the accuracy of a mapper or a SNP caller with wgsim_eval.pl that comes with the package.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/lh3/wgsim

Address of the bookmark: http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/02/12/bioinformatics.btu078.full.pdf

Genome sequences of rare, uncultured bacteria obtained by differential coverage binning of multiple metagenomes

Mads Albertsen, Philip Hugenholtz, Adam Skarshewski, Gene W. Tyson, Kåre L. Nielsen and Per .H. Nielsen

Nature Biotechnology 2013, doi: 10.1038/nbt.2579

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/MadsAlbertsen/multi-metagenome

QuorUM is distributed as an independent software package and as a module of the MaSuRCA assembly software. Both are available under the GPL open source license at http://www.genome.umd.edu.

Address of the bookmark: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0130821

Address of the bookmark: http://www.genome.umd.edu/

Metagenomic simulators are a way of dealing with this issue; they produce artificial sequencing datasets in which both the composition of the microorganisms and the expected results are known. Researchers can then test a pipeline on such a controlled dataset and see precisely how well it functions. However, as metagenomic studies have become larger, more diverse, and more complex, simply generating artificial reads is no longer sufficient. The simulators now have to replicate community variation, sequencing errors, different sequencing platforms, massive data volumes, and even laboratory-based biases.

MIDASim (2024) was designed with a particular emphasis on microbial community dynamics. Unlike previous tools which regarded each simulated sample as individual, MIDASim is able to efficiently generate realistic multi-sample microbiome datasets, covering the cases where changes over time are being tracked. This feature is particularly useful when investigating how microbial communities vary between people, different experimental setups, or at various times. By overcoming the computational limitations of earlier simulation methods, MIDASim has made it easier to carry out large and complex microbiome simulation studies.

A major challenge is scale. Since modern metagenomic projects can involve millions or even billions of sequencing reads, generating such large synthetic datasets can become a significant computational problem. In order to tackle this issue, Izzy (2025) was developed. As a high-throughput metagenomic read simulator, Izzy is designed with speed in mind while still reproducing the typical patterns of sequencing errors. The people who developed it stated that it can be as much as 60 times faster than earlier tools, which makes large-scale simulations far more practical. Now, researchers can begin to ask not how long a simulation will take but rather what size dataset they want to test.

At the same time, the sequencing technology became more diverse. Researchers were not any longer restricted to using Illumina short reads since Oxford Nanopore and PacBio long-read sequencing also became important in the field of metagenomic research. In order to address these new requirements, MeSS (Metagenomic Sequence Simulator, 2025) was developed. The programme is based on a Snakemake framework and is therefore compatible with the Illumina, Oxford Nanopore and PacBio platforms. MeSS has also been designed to operate efficiently and to use less memory than earlier tools; it provides ready-made templates for the microbiomes of different sites in the human body, thus giving researchers a simple means of beginning to generate realistic simulated communities.

The simulation problem became even more specialized. Suppose that sequencing is not based on uniform sampling of DNA? In the case of targeted sequencing and hybridization-capture experiments, particular sequences are deliberately enriched, and the probability of capturing a target depends on both the probe and the target sequence. A standard model based on uniform sampling might fail to take into account this important feature of real experiments. That is why RAmpSim has been designed specifically to handle simulations for capture-based and targeted sequencing. Instead of depending solely on the assumption of uniform sampling, it includes a thermodynamic nearest-neighbor energy model to represent probe–target interactions and sequence-dependent enrichment. As a result, it is especially suitable for applications such as hybridization capture in metagenomics, where the efficiency of recovering a sequence can depend strongly on how it relates to the capture probes. RAmpSim thus reflects a wider trend towards simulations that aim not only to reproduce sequencing output but also key aspects of the experimental process itself.

MIDASim, Izzy, MeSS and RAmpSim all demonstrate how fast metagenomic simulation is evolving. MIDASim is able to deal with realistic variation within a large number of and changing microbial communities. Izzy overcomes the problem of generating very large datasets. MeSS provides support for a number of sequencing technologies in an efficient and repeatable manner. RAmpSim increases the experimental realism for capture-based sequencing. Although each of these tools addresses a separate issue, they all contribute to advancing the field.

Modern metagenomic simulation therefore aims not only at producing artificial FASTQ files. Researchers nowadays desire simulated datasets that reflect community changes, incorporate the characteristics of the sequencing platform, include real error patterns, take into account computational scale, and account for experimental biases. As metagenomic workflows become more advanced, the simulators have to keep up with this development. The tools are now going beyond that of simple data generators; they produce controlled versions of complex metagenomic experiments and thus provide researchers with something that ordinary sequencing data seldom does: a dataset in which the answer is known before any analysis takes place.