Critical Assessment of Metagenome Interpretation—a benchmark of metagenomics software

• Published in: Nature methods Vol. 14; no. 11; pp. 1063 - 1071
• Main Authors: Sczyrba, Alexander, Hofmann, Peter, Belmann, Peter, Koslicki, David, Janssen, Stefan, Dröge, Johannes, Gregor, Ivan, Majda, Stephan, Fiedler, Jessika, Dahms, Eik, Bremges, Andreas, Fritz, Adrian, Garrido-Oter, Ruben, Jørgensen, Tue Sparholt, Shapiro, Nicole, Blood, Philip D, Gurevich, Alexey, Bai, Yang, Turaev, Dmitrij, DeMaere, Matthew Z, Chikhi, Rayan, Nagarajan, Niranjan, Quince, Christopher, Meyer, Fernando, Balvočiūtė, Monika, Hansen, Lars Hestbjerg, Sørensen, Søren J, Chia, Burton K H, Denis, Bertrand, Froula, Jeff L, Wang, Zhong, Egan, Robert, Don Kang, Dongwan, Cook, Jeffrey J, Deltel, Charles, Beckstette, Michael, Lemaitre, Claire, Peterlongo, Pierre, Rizk, Guillaume, Lavenier, Dominique, Wu, Yu-Wei, Singer, Steven W, Jain, Chirag, Strous, Marc, Klingenberg, Heiner, Meinicke, Peter, Barton, Michael D, Lingner, Thomas, Lin, Hsin-Hung, Liao, Yu-Chieh, Silva, Genivaldo Gueiros Z, Cuevas, Daniel A, Edwards, Robert A, Saha, Surya, Piro, Vitor C, Renard, Bernhard Y, Pop, Mihai, Klenk, Hans-Peter, Göker, Markus, Kyrpides, Nikos C, Woyke, Tanja, Vorholt, Julia A, Schulze-Lefert, Paul, Rubin, Edward M, Darling, Aaron E, Rattei, Thomas, McHardy, Alice C
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Nature Publishing Group US 01.11.2017; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 49/23; 631/114; 631/114/1386; 631/326/2565/2142; Algorithms; analysis; Assembly; BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES; Benchmarking; Benchmarks; Biochemistry & Molecular Biology; Biodiversity; Bioinformatics; Biological Microscopy; Biological Techniques; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Biomedical Engineering/Biotechnology; Computer programs; Critical care medicine; Genomes; Life Sciences; MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING; Metagenomics; Microorganisms; Performance assessment; Plasmids; Proteomics; Reproducibility; Sequence Analysis, DNA; Software; Taxonomy
• ISSN: 1548-7091; 1548-7105
• DOI: 10.1038/nmeth.4458

The Critical Assessment of Metagenome Interpretation (CAMI) community initiative presents results from its first challenge, a rigorous benchmarking of software for metagenome assembly, binning and taxonomic profiling. Methods for assembly, taxonomic profiling and binning are key to interpreting metagenome data, but a lack of consensus about benchmarking complicates performance assessment. The Critical Assessment of Metagenome Interpretation (CAMI) challenge has engaged the global developer community to benchmark their programs on highly complex and realistic data sets, generated from ∼700 newly sequenced microorganisms and ∼600 novel viruses and plasmids and representing common experimental setups. Assembly and genome binning programs performed well for species represented by individual genomes but were substantially affected by the presence of related strains. Taxonomic profiling and binning programs were proficient at high taxonomic ranks, with a notable performance decrease below family level. Parameter settings markedly affected performance, underscoring their importance for program reproducibility. The CAMI results highlight current challenges but also provide a roadmap for software selection to answer specific research questions.