Nonpareil 3: Fast Estimation of Metagenomic Coverage and Sequence Diversity
[1];
- Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States). School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
- Michigan State Univ., East Lansing, MI (United States). Center for Microbial Ecology
- Michigan State Univ., East Lansing, MI (United States). Center for Microbial Ecology, Dept. of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, and Dept. of Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences
- Michigan State Univ., East Lansing, MI (United States). Center for Microbial Ecology and Dept. of Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences
- Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States). School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and School of Biological Sciences
- Univ. of North Carolina, Charlotte, NC (United States)
Estimations of microbial community diversity based on metagenomic data sets are affected, often to an unknown degree, by biases derived from insufficient coverage and reference database-dependent estimations of diversity. For instance, the completeness of reference databases cannot be generally estimated since it depends on the extant diversity sampled to date, which, with the exception of a few habitats such as the human gut, remains severely undersampled. Further, estimation of the degree of coverage of a microbial community by a metagenomic data set is prohibitively time-consuming for large data sets, and coverage values may not be directly comparable between data sets obtained with different sequencing technologies. Here, we extend Nonpareil, a database-independent tool for the estimation of coverage in metagenomic data sets, to a high-performance computing implementation that scales up to hundreds of cores and includes, in addition, a k-mer-based estimation as sensitive as the original alignment-based version but about three hundred times as fast. Further, we propose a metric of sequence diversity (Nd) derived directly from Nonpareil curves that correlates well with alpha diversity assessed by traditional metrics. We use this metric in different experiments demonstrating the correlation with the Shannon index estimated on 16S rRNA gene profiles and show that Nd additionally reveals seasonal patterns in marine samples that are not captured by the Shannon index and more precise rankings of the magnitude of diversity of microbial communities in different habitats. Therefore, the new version of Nonpareil, called Nonpareil 3, advances the toolbox for metagenomic analyses of microbiomes.
- Research Organization:
- Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, WI (United States); Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC)
- Grant/Contract Number:
- FC02-07ER64494; SC0006662
- OSTI ID:
- 1511043
- Journal Information:
- mSystems, Vol. 3, Issue 3; ISSN 2379-5077
- Publisher:
- American Society for MicrobiologyCopyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Web of Science
Similar Records
Metagenomic Insights Into the Microbial Iron Cycle of Subseafloor Habitats
Eukaryotic genomes from a global metagenomic data set illuminate trophic modes and biogeography of ocean plankton