Agriculture Commons^™

Tackling Soil Diversity With The Assembly Of Large, Complex Metagenomes, Adina Howe, Janet K. Jansson, Stephanie Malfatti, Susannah Tringe, James Tiedje, C. Titus Brown

Adina Howe

Investigations of complex environments rely on large volumes of sequence data to adequately sample the genetic diversity of a microbial community. The assembly of short-read data into longer, more interpretable sequence currently is not possible for much of the research community because it requires specialized computational facilities. We present approaches that make de novo assembly of complex metagenomes more accessible. These approaches scale data size with community richness and subdivide the data into tractable subsets representing individual species. We applied these methods toward the assembly of two large soil metagenomes to identify important metagenomic references and show that considerably more …