PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Nathan LaPierre
AU  - Serghei Mangul
AU  - Mohammed Alser
AU  - Igor Mandric
AU  - Nicholas C. Wu
AU  - David Koslicki
AU  - Eleazar Eskin
TI  - MiCoP: Microbial Community Profiling method for detecting viral and fungal organisms in metagenomic samples
AID  - 10.1101/243188
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 243188
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/01/04/243188.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/01/04/243188.full
AB  - Background High throughput sequencing has spurred the development of metagenomics, which involves the direct analysis of microbial communities in various environments such as soil, ocean water, and the human body. Many existing methods based on marker genes or k-mers have limited sensitivity or are too computationally demanding for many users. Additionally, most work in metagenomics has focused on bacteria and archaea, neglecting to study other key microbes such as viruses and eukaryotes.Results Here we present a method, MiCoP (Microbiome Community Profiling), that uses fast-mapping of reads to build a comprehensive reference database of full genomes from viruses and eukaryotes to achieve maximum read usage and enable the analysis of the virome and eukaryome in each sample. We demonstrate that mapping of metagenomic reads is feasible for the smaller viral and eukaryotic reference databases. We show that our method is accurate on simulated and mock community data and identifies many more viral and fungal species than previously-reported results on real data from the Human Microbiome Project.Conclusions MiCoP is a mapping-based method that proves more effective than existing methods at abundance profiling of viruses and eukaryotes in metagenomic samples. MiCoP can be used to detect the full diversity of these communities. The code, data, and documentation is publicly available on GitHub at: https://github.com/smangul1/MiCoP