RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Identifying Core Operons in Metagenomic Data
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2019.12.20.885269
DO 10.1101/2019.12.20.885269
A1 Xiao Hu
A1 Iddo Friedberg
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/01/28/2019.12.20.885269.abstract
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