Methodology article
MLTreeMap - accurate Maximum Likelihood placement of environmental DNA sequences into taxonomic and functional reference phylogenies
1 Institute of Molecular Life Sciences and Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, University of Zurich, Switzerland
2 Ph.D. program in Molecular Life Sciences, University of Zurich and Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland
3 The Exelixis Lab, Department of Computer Science, Technische Universität München, Germany
BMC Genomics 2010, 11:461 doi:10.1186/1471-2164-11-461
Published: 5 August 2010Abstract
Background
Shotgun sequencing of environmental DNA is an essential technique for characterizing uncultivated microbes in situ. However, the taxonomic and functional assignment of the obtained sequence fragments remains a pressing problem.
Results
Existing algorithms are largely optimized for speed and coverage; in contrast, we present here a software framework that focuses on a restricted set of informative gene families, using Maximum Likelihood to assign these with the best possible accuracy. This framework ('MLTreeMap'; http://mltreemap.org/ webcite) uses raw nucleotide sequences as input, and includes hand-curated, extensible reference information.
Conclusions
We discuss how we validated our pipeline using complete genomes as well as simulated and actual environmental sequences.
