ICoVeR – an interactive visualization tool for verification and refinement of metagenomic bins

摘要

BackgroundRecent advances in high-throughput sequencing allow for much deeper exploitation of natural and engineered microbial communities, and to unravel so-called “microbial dark matter” (microbes that until now have evaded cultivation). Metagenomic analyses result in a large number of genomic fragments (contigs) that need to be grouped (binned) in order to reconstruct draft microbial genomes. While several contig binning algorithms have been developed in the past 2 years, they often lack consensus. Furthermore, these software tools typically lack a provision for the visualization of data and bin characteristics.