New Paper: Microbial abundance, activity and population genomic profiling with mOTUs2
Fresh off the press in Nature Communications, an update on the mOTUs (marker gene-based operational taxonomic units) concept.
Basic summary of the motus concept
This concept was introduced in the first mOTUs paper, which itself built upon the specI concept:
Use single-copy marker genes to identify and quantify species in metagenomic samples. Single-copy marker genes are gene families such that (1) every1 organism has a gene in that family and (2) organisms only have one copy.
Use marker genes from both genomes and metagenomes to characterize species. Co-abundance can identify species in metagenomes even if there is no reference genome available for them.
What is new in motus2?
First of all, it updates the database with newer data, which is valuable for the tool, but this version includes a few conceptual improvements as well:
There is a better integration between the reference-derived and the metagenomic-identified mOTUs.
The first version was only relevant for human gut samples, this version includes mOTUs for multiple environments (see Fig 1b above).
We show that mOTUs work well with metatranscriptomics data to estimate species abundances. As these are housekeeping genes, their expression is constant enough that one can use mOTUs as a good proxy for species abundance (this was benchmarked by using samples from which both metagenomics and metatranscriptomics are available; see Fig 4a above).
SNV profiles on the marker genes are a good proxy for SNV profiles on the whole genome, so that marker genes can be used for subspecies identification, whereas before we had used the whole genome.
You can get the tool from https://motu-tool.org/, through bioconda, and there is a module for running it through NGLess.
Every is used in the biological, not logical sense; that is, it means >90% of the time that we know about it, but, there are exceptions; also we might not know anything of the 99% of organisms out there.↩