A two-phase binning algorithm using l-mer frequency on groups of non-overlapping reads

摘要

BackgroundMetagenomics is the study of genetic materials derived directly from complex microbial samples, instead of from culture. One of the crucial steps in metagenomic analysis, referred to as “binning”, is to separate reads into clusters that represent genomes from closely related organisms. Among the existing binning methods, unsupervised methods base the classification on features extracted from reads, and especially taking advantage in case of the limitation of reference database availability. However, their performance, under various aspects, is still being investigated by recent theoretical and empirical studies. The one addressed in this paper is among those efforts to enhance the accuracy of the classification.