Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-2020
Abstract
Large-scale metagenomic assemblies have uncovered thousands of new species greatly expanding the known diversity of microbiomes in specific habitats. To investigate the roles of these uncultured species in human health or the environment, researchers need to incorporate their genome assemblies into a reference database for taxonomic classification. However, this procedure is hindered by the lack of a well-curated taxonomic tree for newly discovered species, which is required by current metagenomics tools. Here we report DeepMicrobes, a deep learning-based computational framework for taxonomic classification that allows researchers to bypass this limitation. We show the advantage of DeepMicrobes over state-of-the-art tools in species and genus identification and comparable accuracy in abundance estimation. We trained DeepMicrobes on genomes reconstructed from gut microbiomes and discovered potential novel signatures in inflammatory bowel diseases. DeepMicrobes facilitates effective investigations into the uncharacterized roles of metagenomic species.
Recommended Citation
Liang Q, Bible PW, Liu Y, Zou B, Wei L. DeepMicrobes: taxonomic classification for metagenomics with deep learning. NAR Genomics and Bioinformatics. 2020. doi:10.1093/nargab/lqaa009
Comments
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com