Terabase-Scale Coassembly of a Tropical Soil Microbiome
Robert Riley, Robert M. Bowers, Antônio Pedro Camargo, Ashley Campbell, Rob Egan, Emiley A. Eloe‐Fadrosh, Brian Foster, Steven Hofmeyr, Marcel Huntemann, Matthew Kellom, Jeffrey A. Kimbrel, Leonid Oliker, Katherine Yelick, Jennifer Pett‐Ridge, Asaf Salamov, Neha Varghese, Alicia Clum
Abstract
Petabases of reads are being produced by environmental metagenome sequencing. An essential step in analyzing these data is metagenome assembly, the computational reconstruction of genome sequences from microbial communities. "Coassembly" of metagenomic sequence data, in which multiple samples are assembled together, enables more complete detection of microbial genomes in an environment than "multiassembly," in which samples are assembled individually. To demonstrate the potential for coassembling terabases of metagenome data to drive biological discovery, we applied MetaHipMer2, a distributed metagenome assembler that runs on supercomputing clusters, to coassemble 3.4 Tbp of reads from a humid tropical soil environment. The resulting coassembly, its functional annotation, and analysis are presented here. The coassembly yielded more, and phylogenetically more diverse, microbial, eukaryotic, and viral genomes than the multiassembly of the same data. Our resource may facilitate the discovery of novel microbial biology in tropical soils and demonstrates the value of terabase-scale metagenome sequencing.