TY  - JOUR
A1  - Milanese, Alessio
A1  - Mende, Daniel R
A1  - Paoli, Lucas
A1  - Salazar, Guillem
A1  - Ruscheweyh, Hans-Joachim
A1  - Cuenca, Miguelangel
A1  - Hingamp, Pascal
A1  - Alves, Renato
A1  - Costea, Paul I
A1  - Coelho, Luis Pedro
A1  - Schmidt, Thomas S. B.
A1  - Almeida, Alexandre
A1  - Mitchell, Alex L
A1  - Finn, Robert D.
A1  - Huerta-Cepas, Jaime
A1  - Bork, Peer
A1  - Zeller, Georg
A1  - Sunagawa, Shinichi
T1  - Microbial abundance, activity and population genomic profiling with mOTUs2
JF  - Nature Communications
N2  - Metagenomic sequencing has greatly improved our ability to profile the composition of environmental and host-associated microbial communities. However, the dependency of most methods on reference genomes, which are currently unavailable for a substantial fraction of microbial species, introduces estimation biases. We present an updated and functionally extended tool based on universal (i.e., reference-independent), phylogenetic marker gene (MG)-based operational taxonomic units (mOTUs) enabling the profiling of >7700 microbial species. As more than 30% of them could not previously be quantified at this taxonomic resolution, relative abundance estimates based on mOTUs are more accurate compared to other methods. As a new feature, we show that mOTUs, which are based on essential housekeeping genes, are demonstrably well-suited for quantification of basal transcriptional activity of community members. Furthermore, single nucleotide variation profiles estimated using mOTUs reflect those from whole genomes, which allows for comparing microbial strain populations (e.g., across different human body sites).
KW  - microbiome
KW  - software
Y1  - 2019
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-224089
VL  - 10
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Coelho, Luis Pedro
A1  - Alves, Renato
A1  - Monteiro, Paulo
A1  - Huerta-Cepas, Jaime
A1  - Freitas, Ana Teresa
A1  - Bork, Peer
T1  - NG-meta-profiler: fast processing of metagenomes using NGLess, a domain-specific language
JF  - Microbiome
N2  - Background
Shotgun metagenomes contain a sample of all the genomic material in an environment, allowing for the characterization of a microbial community. In order to understand these communities, bioinformatics methods are crucial. A common first step in processing metagenomes is to compute abundance estimates of different taxonomic or functional groups from the raw sequencing data.

Given the breadth of the field, computational solutions need to be flexible and extensible, enabling the combination of different tools into a larger pipeline.

Results
We present NGLess and NG-meta-profiler. NGLess is a domain specific language for describing next-generation sequence processing pipelines. It was developed with the goal of enabling user-friendly computational reproducibility. It provides built-in support for many common operations on sequencing data and is extensible with external tools with configuration files.

Using this framework, we developed NG-meta-profiler, a fast profiler for metagenomes which performs sequence preprocessing, mapping to bundled databases, filtering of the mapping results, and profiling (taxonomic and functional). It is significantly faster than either MOCAT2 or htseq-count and (as it builds on NGLess) its results are perfectly reproducible.

Conclusions
NG-meta-profiler is a high-performance solution for metagenomics processing built on NGLess. It can be used as-is to execute standard analyses or serve as the starting point for customization in a perfectly reproducible fashion.

NGLess and NG-meta-profiler are open source software (under the liberal MIT license) and can be downloaded from https://ngless.embl.de or installed through bioconda.
KW  - metagenomics
KW  - next-generation sequencing
KW  - domain-specific language
Y1  - 2019
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-223161
VL  - 7
IS  - 84
ER  -