RITA: Rapid Identification of High-Confidence Taxonomic Assignments for Metagenomic Data

Definition

Algorithm, software, and Web service for taxonomic classification of metagenome fragments using both homology and compositional information.

Introduction

A central task in many metagenomic studies is the inference of community function from sequence data. An additional challenge is the need to assign functional genes to particular members of the community, in order to determine which organisms are responsible for carrying out which molecular processes. While sequences derived from a given microorganism often carry a “signature” that reflects mutational bias and other processes in the genome of that organism (Campbell et al. 1999), these patterns are by no means uniform and they often cannot distinguish closely related organisms. Further compounding the problem is the reliance on short-read-based approaches to metagenome sequencing, which can generate reads less than 200 nucleotides in length, and short or ambiguous assemblies in many cases. Successful classification methods...