Dataset Information

Beyond classification: gene-family phylogenies from shotgun metagenomic reads enable accurate community analysis.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Sequence-based phylogenetic trees are a well-established tool for characterizing diversity of both macroorganisms and microorganisms. Phylogenetic methods have recently been applied to shotgun metagenomic data from microbial communities, particularly with the aim of classifying reads. But the accuracy of gene-family phylogenies that characterize evolutionary relationships among short, non-overlapping sequencing reads has not been thoroughly evaluated.

Results

To quantify errors in metagenomic read trees, we developed MetaPASSAGE, a software pipeline to generate in silico bacterial communities, simulate a sample of shotgun reads from a gene family represented in the community, orient or translate reads, and produce a profile-based alignment of the reads from which a gene-family phylogenetic tree can be built. We applied MetaPASSAGE to a variety of RNA and protein-coding gene families, built trees using a range of different phylogenetic methods, and compared the resulting trees using topological and branch-length error metrics. We identified read length as one of the major sources of error. Because phylogenetic methods use a reference database of full-length sequences from the gene family to guide construction of alignments and trees, we found that error can also be substantially reduced through increasing the size and diversity of the reference database. Finally, UniFrac analysis, which compares metagenomic samples based on a summary statistic computed over all branches in a read tree, is very robust to the level of error we observe.

Conclusions

Bacterial community diversity can be quantified using phylogenetic approaches applied to shotgun metagenomic data. As sequencing reads get longer and more genomes across the bacterial tree of life are sequenced, the accuracy of this approach will continue to improve, opening the door to more applications.

SUBMITTER: Riesenfeld SJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3701559 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Beyond classification: gene-family phylogenies from shotgun metagenomic reads enable accurate community analysis.

Riesenfeld Samantha J SJ Pollard Katherine S KS

BMC genomics 20130622

<h4>Background</h4>Sequence-based phylogenetic trees are a well-established tool for characterizing diversity of both macroorganisms and microorganisms. Phylogenetic methods have recently been applied to shotgun metagenomic data from microbial communities, particularly with the aim of classifying reads. But the accuracy of gene-family phylogenies that characterize evolutionary relationships among short, non-overlapping sequencing reads has not been thoroughly evaluated.<h4>Results</h4>To quantif ...[more]

PMID: 23799973

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Project description:In recent years several different fields, such as ecology, medicine and microbiology, have experienced an unprecedented development due to the possibility of direct sequencing of microbioimic samples. Among problems that researchers in the field have to deal with, taxonomic classification of metagenomic reads is one of the most challenging. State of the art methods classify single reads with almost 100% precision. However, very often, the performance in terms of recall falls at about 50%. As a consequence, state-of-the-art methods are indeed capable of correctly classify only half of the reads in the sample. How to achieve better performances in terms of overall quality of classification remains a largely unsolved problem.In this paper we propose a method for metagenomics CLassification Improvement with Overlapping Reads (CLIOR), that exploits the information carried by the overlapping reads graph of the input read dataset to improve recall, f-measure, and the estimated abundance of species. In this work, we applied CLIOR on top of the classification produced by the classifier Clark-l. Experiments on simulated and synthetic metagenomes show that CLIOR can lead to substantial improvement of the recall rate, sometimes doubling it. On average, on simulated datasets, the increase of recall is paired with an higher precision too, while on synthetic datasets it comes at expenses of a small loss of precision. On experiments on real metagenomes CLIOR is able to assign many more reads while keeping the abundance ratios in line with previous studies.Our results showed that with CLIOR is possible to boost the recall of a state-of-the-art metagenomic classifier by inferring and/or correcting the assignment of reads with missing or erroneous labeling. CLIOR is not restricted to the reads classification algorithm used in our experiments, but it may be applied to other methods too. Finally, CLIOR does not need large computational resources, and it can be run on a laptop.

Dataset Information

Beyond classification: gene-family phylogenies from shotgun metagenomic reads enable accurate community analysis.

Background

Results

Conclusions

Publications

Beyond classification: gene-family phylogenies from shotgun metagenomic reads enable accurate community analysis.

Similar Datasets

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