Fast and sensitive taxonomic assignment to metagenomic contigs

Abstract

SUMMARY: MMseqs2 taxonomy is a new tool to assign taxonomic labels to metagenomic contigs. It extracts all possible protein fragments from each contig, quickly retains those that can contribute to taxonomic annotation, assigns them with robust labels and determines the contig's taxonomic identity by weighted voting. Its fragment extraction step is suitable for the analysis of all domains of life. MMseqs2 taxonomy is 2-18× faster than state-of-the-art tools and also contains new modules for creating and manipulating taxonomic reference databases as well as reporting and visualizing taxonomic assignments. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: MMseqs2 taxonomy is part of the MMseqs2 free open-source software package available for Linux, macOS and Windows at https://mmseqs.com. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.