PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Xiao Hu
AU  - Iddo Friedberg
TI  - Identifying Core Operons in Metagenomic Data
AID  - 10.1101/2019.12.20.885269
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2019.12.20.885269
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/01/28/2019.12.20.885269.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/01/28/2019.12.20.885269.full
AB  - An operon is a functional unit of DNA whose genes are co-transcribed on polycistronic mRNA, in a co-regulated fashion. Operons are a powerful mechanism of introducing functional complexity in bacteria, and are therefore of interest in microbial genetics, physiology, biochemistry, and evolution. Here we present a Pipeline for Operon Exploration in Metagenomes or POEM. At the heart of POEM lies the concept of a core operon, a functional unit enabled by a predicted operon in a metagenome. Using a series of benchmarks, we show the high accuracy of POEM, and demonstrate its use on a human gut metagenome sample. We conclude that POEM is a useful tool for analyzing metagenomes beyond the genomic level, and for identifying multi-gene functionalities and possible neofunctionalization in metagenomes. Availability: https://github.com/Rinoahu/POEM_py3k