metaBIT, an integrative and automated metagenomic pipeline for analysing microbial profiles from high-throughput sequencing shotgun data

Guillaume Louvel, Clio Der Sarkissian, Kristian Ebbesen Hanghøj, Ludovic Antoine Alexandre Orlando

    23 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Micro-organisms account for most of the Earth's biodiversity and yet remain largely unknown. The complexity and diversity of microbial communities present in clinical and environmental samples can now be robustly investigated in record times and prices thanks to recent advances in high-throughput DNA sequencing (HTS). Here, we develop metaBIT, an open-source computational pipeline automatizing routine microbial profiling of shotgun HTS data. Customizable by the user at different stringency levels, it performs robust taxonomy-based assignment and relative abundance calculation of microbial taxa, as well as cross-sample statistical analyses of microbial diversity distributions. We demonstrate the versatility of metaBIT within a range of published HTS data sets sampled from the environment (soil and seawater) and the human body (skin and gut), but also from archaeological specimens. We present the diversity of outputs provided by the pipeline for the visualization of microbial profiles (barplots, heatmaps) and for their characterization and comparison (diversity indices, hierarchical clustering and principal coordinates analyses). We show that metaBIT allows an automatic, fast and user-friendly profiling of the microbial DNA present in HTS shotgun data sets. The applications of metaBIT are vast, from monitoring of laboratory errors and contaminations, to the reconstruction of past and present microbiota, and the detection of candidate species, including pathogens.

    Original languageEnglish
    JournalMolecular Ecology Resources
    Volume16
    Issue number6
    Pages (from-to)1415-1427
    Number of pages13
    ISSN1755-098X
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 1 Nov 2016

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'metaBIT, an integrative and automated metagenomic pipeline for analysing microbial profiles from high-throughput sequencing shotgun data'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this