taxMaps - Ultra-comprehensive and highly accurate taxonomic classification of short-read data in reasonable time

Abstract

High-throughput sequencing is a revolutionary technology for the analysis of metagenomic samples. However, querying large volumes of reads against comprehensive DNA/RNA databases in a sensitive manner can be compute-intensive. Here, we present taxMaps, a highly efficient, sensitive and fully scalable taxonomic classification tool, capable of delivering classification accuracy comparable to that of BLASTn, but at up to 3 orders of magnitude less computational cost. taxMaps is freely available for academic and non-commercial research purposes at https://github.com/nygenome/taxmaps.