New insights from 33,813 publicly available metagenome-assembled-genomes (MAGs) assembled from the rumen microbiome

Recent rumen microbiome metagenomics papers1,2 have published hundreds of metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs), comparing them to 4,941 MAGs published by Stewart et al3 in order to define novelty. However, there are many more publicly available MAGs from ruminants. In this paper, for the first time, all available resources are combined, catalogued and de-replicated to define putative species-level bins. As well as providing new insights into the constitution of the rumen microbiome, including an updated estimate of the number of microbial species in the rumen, this work demonstrates that a lack of community-adopted standards for the release and annotation of MAGs hinders progress in microbial ecology and metagenomics.