Robust taxonomic classification of uncharted microbial sequences and bins with CAT and BAT

Abstract

Current-day metagenomics increasingly requires taxonomic classification of long DNA sequences and metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) of unknown microorganisms. We show that the standard best-hit approach often leads to classifications that are too specific. We present tools to classify high-quality metagenomic contigs (Contig Annotation Tool, CAT) and MAGs (Bin Annotation Tool, BAT) and thoroughly benchmark them with simulated metagenomic sequences that are classified against a reference database where related sequences are increasingly removed, thereby simulating increasingly unknown queries. We find that the query sequences are correctly classified at low taxonomic ranks if closely related organisms are present in the reference database, while classifications are made higher in the taxonomy when closely related organisms are absent, thus avoiding spurious classification specificity. In a real-world challenge, we apply BAT to over 900 MAGs from a recent rumen metagenomics study and classified 97% consistently with prior phylogeny-based classifications, but in a fully automated fashion.