Microbial abundance, activity and population genomic profiling with mOTUs2
A “Nature Communications” paper highlights a bioinformatic method, developed by the Sunagawa lab (Institute of Microbiology) in collaboration with the Zeller group at EMBL, that enables accurate abundance and activity profiling of known and unknown species that live in complex microbial communities.
Microbial communities are essential for life on earth. The species composition and gene transcriptional activity in these communities can be analysed by high-throughput sequencing of DNA and RNA. However, most methods depend on the availability of reference genome sequences, which are not available for a substantial fraction of microbial species, leading to quantification biases due to an overrepresentation of well-characterized species in current databases. We developed an updated and functionally extended bioinformatic tool based on reference-independent, phylogenetic marker gene-based operational taxonomic units (mOTUs). It accurately profiles >7,700 microbial species, more than 30% of which are currently unknown. As new features, mOTUs can also be used for the quantification of basal transcriptional activity of community members and for compute-efficient comparisons of microbial strain populations. The tool is available at: external page https://motu-tool.org
Link to the paper in external page Nature Communications