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bioRxiv · 10.1101/763813

DeepMAsED: Evaluating the quality of metagenomic assemblies

Rojas-Carulla, M.·Ley, R. E.·Schoelkopf, B.·Youngblut, N. D.
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Abstract

Motivation/backgroundMethodological advances in metagenome assembly are rapidly increasing in the number of published metagenome assemblies. However, identifying misassemblies is challenging due to a lack of closely related reference genomes that can act as pseudo ground truth. Existing reference-free methods are no longer maintained, can make strong assumptions that may not hold across a diversity of research projects, and have not been validated on large scale metagenome assemblies.\n\nResultsWe present DeepMAsED, a deep learning approach for identifying misassembled contigs without the need for reference genomes. Moreover, we provide an in silico pipeline for generating large-scale, realistic metagenome assemblies for comprehensive model training and testing. DeepMAsED accuracy substantially exceeds the state-of-the-art when applied to large and complex metagenome assemblies. Our model estimates close to a 5% contig misassembly rate in two recent large-scale metagenome assembly publications.\n\nConclusionsDeepMAsED accurately identifies misassemblies in metagenome-assembled contigs from a broad diversity of bacteria and archaea without the need for reference genomes or strong modelling assumptions. Running DeepMAsED is straight-forward, as well as is model re-training with our dataset generation pipeline. Therefore, DeepMAsED is a flexible misassembly classifier that can be applied to a wide range of metagenome assembly projects.\n\nAvailabilityDeepMAsED is available from GitHub at https://github.com/leylabmpi/DeepMAsED.

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Rojas-Carulla, M., Ley, R. E., Schoelkopf, B., Youngblut, N. D.. 2019-09-10. DeepMAsED: Evaluating the quality of metagenomic assemblies. https://doi.org/10.1101/763813

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