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Skani enables accurate and efficient genome comparison for modern metagenomic datasets

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Modern high-throughput metagenomics is producing hundreds of thousands of metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs), which is overwhelming traditional sequence-similarity search methods. We present a computational method, skani, that efficiently compares MAGs on a terabyte scale while being robust to the inherent noise in MAGs, enabling larger and more accurate analyses.

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Fig. 1: Skani gives improved clustering and speed over competing methods.

References

  1. Nayfach, S. et al. A genomic catalog of Earth’s microbiomes. Nat. Biotechnol. 39, 499–509 (2021). This paper highlights the scale of modern collections of MAGs, which number in the hundreds of thousands.

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This is a summary of: Shaw, J. & Yu, Y. W. Fast and robust metagenomic sequence comparison through sparse chaining with skani. Nat. Methods, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-023-02018-3 (2023).

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Skani enables accurate and efficient genome comparison for modern metagenomic datasets. Nat Methods 20, 1633–1634 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-023-02019-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-023-02019-2

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