Milot Mirdita | Search PubMed

PubMed2025

Easy and interactive taxonomic profiling with Metabuli App.

SUMMARY: Accurate metagenomic taxonomic profiling is critical for understanding microbial communities. However, computational analysis often requires command-line proficiency and high-performance computing resources. To lower these barriers, we developed Metabuli App, an all-in-one desktop application that efficiently runs taxonomic profiling locally on a consumer-grade computer. It features user-friendly graphical interfaces for custom database curation, raw read quality control (QC), taxonomic profiling, and interactive result visualization. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: GPLv3-licensed source code and prebuilt apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux are available at https://github.com/steineggerlab/Metabuli-App and are archived at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15876171. Analysis scripts are available at https://github.com/jaebeom-kim/metabuli-app-analysis. The Sankey-based taxonomy visualization component is available at https://github.com/steineggerlab/taxoview for easy integration into other web projects.

Software↗

PubMed2025

De novo discovery of conserved gene clusters in microbial genomes with Spacedust.

Metagenomics has revolutionized environmental and human-associated microbiome studies. However, the limited fraction of proteins with known biological processes and molecular functions presents a major bottleneck. In prokaryotes and viruses, evolution favors keeping genes participating in the same biological processes colocalized as conserved gene clusters. Conversely, conservation of gene neighborhood indicates functional association. Here we present Spacedust, a tool for systematic, de novo discovery of conserved gene clusters. To find homologous protein matches, Spacedust uses fast and sensitive structure comparison with Foldseek. Partially conserved clusters are detected using novel clustering and order conservation P values. We demonstrate Spacedust's sensitivity with an all-versus-all analysis of 1,308 bacterial genomes, identifying 72,843 conserved gene clusters containing 58% of the 4.2 million genes. It recovered 95% of antiviral defense system clusters annotated by the specialized tool PADLOC. Spacedust's high sensitivity and speed will facilitate the annotation of large numbers of sequenced bacterial, archaeal and viral genomes.

Metagenomics↗