BOL: Related items

nf-core/mag v5: Advancing Genome-Resolved Metagenomics

LEGE — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 20:27:51 -0500

Metagenomics is rapidly moving beyond short-read sequencing. With the increasing adoption of long-read technologies, researchers can generate more contiguous assemblies—but converting these reads into reliable metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) remains computationally challenging.

nf-core/mag v5 (https://github.com/nf-core/mag) addresses this challenge by extending its reproducible Nextflow-based workflow for modern genome-resolved metagenomics.

A key addition is support for long-read-only metagenomic assembly and bin refinement, enabling long-read data to be processed through an integrated workflow. The release also introduces five additional binning tools, providing complementary strategies for recovering genomes from complex microbial communities.

The workflow has also expanded beyond conventional bacterial and archaeal MAGs, with improved classification of viruses and eukaryotes, together with enhanced genome-quality assessment.

Conceptually, the workflow brings together:

Reads → QC → Assembly → Binning → Bin refinement → Taxonomic classification → MAG quality assessment

The real strength of nf-core/mag is not any single algorithm, but the integration and reproducibility of multiple tools within a standardized workflow. This is particularly important for large-scale metagenomic studies where software versions, parameters, databases and computational environments can strongly influence results.

After seven years of development involving multiple curator teams and the wider nf-core community, v5 demonstrates how community-driven workflow development can keep metagenomic analysis aligned with rapidly evolving sequencing technologies.

The future of genome-resolved metagenomics is not simply longer reads—it is better integration of assembly, binning, refinement and quality control within reproducible computational workflows.

Read the full paper in Bioinformatics https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/42/9/btag628/8770536?

Shinyheatmap

Jit — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 05:12:11 -0500

Background: Transcriptomics, metabolomics, metagenomics, and other various next-generation sequencing (-omics) fields are known for their production of large datasets. Visualizing such big data has posed technical challenges in biology, both in terms of available computational resources as well as programming acumen. Since heatmaps are used to depict high-dimensional numerical data as a colored grid of cells, efficiency and speed have often proven to be critical considerations in the process of successfully converting data into graphics. For example, rendering interactive heatmaps from large input datasets (e.g., 100k+ rows) has been computationally infeasible on both desktop computers and web browsers. In addition to memory requirements, programming skills and knowledge have frequently been barriers-to-entry for creating highly customizable heatmaps. Results: We propose shinyheatmap: an advanced user-friendly heatmap software suite capable of efficiently creating highly customizable static and interactive biological heatmaps in a web browser. shinyheatmap is a low memory footprint program, making it particularly well-suited for the interactive visualization of extremely large datasets that cannot typically be computed in-memory due to size restrictions. Conclusions: shinyheatmap is hosted online as a freely available web server with an intuitive graphical user interface: http://shinyheatmap.com. The methods are implemented in R, and are available as part of the shinyheatmap project at: https://github.com/Bohdan-Khomtchouk/shinyheatmap.

More at http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/09/21/076463

Address of the bookmark: http://shinyheatmap.com/

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

Jit — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 03:44:34 -0600

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.

Address of the bookmark: https://bitbucket.org/berkeleylab/metabat

Metagenomics role in antibiotic resistance

Rahul Agarwal — Mon, 02 Jun 2014 08:04:40 -0500

Simka and SimkaMin are comparative metagenomics method dedicated to NGS datasets

Neel — Sat, 06 Jul 2019 13:56:10 -0500

Simka is a de novo comparative metagenomics tool. Simka represents each dataset as a k-mer spectrum and compute several classical ecological distances between them.

Developper: Gaëtan Benoit, PhD, former member of the Genscale team at Inria.

Contact: claire dot lemaitre at inria dot fr

Simka and SimkaMin are comparative metagenomics method dedicated to NGS datasets. https://gatb.inria.fr/software/simka/

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/GATB/simka

CoverM: Read coverage calculator for metagenomics

Neel — Thu, 29 Apr 2021 23:39:14 -0500

CoverM aims to be a configurable, easy to use and fast DNA read coverage and relative abundance calculator focused on metagenomics applications.

CoverM calculates coverage of genomes/MAGs coverm genome (help) or individual contigs coverm contig (help). Calculating coverage by read mapping, its input can either be BAM files sorted by reference, or raw reads and reference genomes in various formats.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/wwood/CoverM

The Breitbart lab

Tue, 17 Sep 2013 18:19:49 -0500

Breitbart’s lab has created a new branch of biology called metagenomics in which one can sample and sequence genetic material collected from the environment.

Breitbart lab is located in the College of Marine Science at the University of South Florida. She is chosen as top "10 Brilliant" scientist by Popular Science magazine.
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-09/mya-breitbart

Lab Link:
https://sites.google.com/site/breitbartgenomicslab/
http://www.marine.usf.edu/faculty/mya-breitbart.shtml

MaxBin: software for binning assembled metagenomic sequences based on an Expectation-Maximization algorithm.

Jit — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 04:03:38 -0600

MaxBin is software for binning assembled metagenomic sequences based on an Expectation-Maximization algorithm. Users can understand the underlying bins (genomes) of the microbes in their metagenomes by simply providing assembled metagenomic sequences and the reads coverage information or sequencing reads. For users' convenience MaxBin will report genome-related statistics, including estimated completeness, GC content and genome size in the binning summary page.

Users can use MEGAN or similar software on MaxBin bins to find the taxonomy of each bin after the binning process is finished.

https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/32/4/605/1744462/MaxBin-2-0-an-automated-binning-algorithm-to

The most recent version of MaxBin is 2.2, which supports the analysis of coassemblies of multiple samples. It is available at this JBEI downloads sites as well as MaxBin and MaxBin 2.0 sourceforge sites.

Address of the bookmark: http://downloads.jbei.org/data/microbial_communities/MaxBin/MaxBin.html

COCACOLA (binning metagenomic contigs using sequence COmposition, read CoverAge, CO-alignment, and paired-end read LinkAge)

Jit — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 08:50:57 -0600

COCACOLA is a general framework that combines different types of information: sequence COmposition, CoverAge across multiple samples, CO-alignment to reference genomes and paired-end reads LinkAge to automatically bin contigs into OTUs. Furthermore, COCACOLA seamlessly embraces customized prior knowledge to facilitate binning accuracy.

News: Python version of COCACOLA is available now!

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/younglululu/COCACOLA

PIT Bioinformatics Group

Tue, 16 Jun 2015 14:34:26 -0500

PIT Bioinformatics Group solves problems in bioinformatics and computational biology. Recent developed online tools:

- Budapest Reference Connectome: View a parametrizable connectome (brain graph).
- AmphoraNet: The webserver implementation of the AMPHORA2 workflow for phylogenetic analysis of metagenomic shotgun sequencing data.
- AmphoraVizu: Chart visualization for metagenomics analysis tools AMPHORA2 and AmphoraNet.
- SCARF: Free online association rule mining tool.

More at: http://pitgroup.org