A robust statistical framework for reconstructing genomes from metagenomic data

We present software that reconstructs genomes from shotgun metagenomic sequences using a reference-independent approach. This method permits the identification of OTUs in large complex communities where many species are unknown. Binning reduces the complexity of a metagenomic dataset enabling many downstream analyses previously unavailable. In this study we developed MetaBAT, a robust statistical framework that integrates probabilistic distances of genome abundance with sequence composition for automatic binning. Applying MetaBAT to a human gut microbiome dataset identified 173 highly specific genomes bins including many representing previously unidentified species.