Protein-level assembly increases protein sequence recovery from metagenomic samples manyfold
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Abstract
The open-source de novo protein-level assembler, Plass ( https://plass.mmseqs.com ), assembles six-frame-translated sequencing reads into protein sequences. It recovers 2–10 times more protein sequences from complex metagenomes and can assemble huge datasets. We assembled two redundancy-filtered reference protein catalogs, 2 billion sequences from 640 soil samples (soil reference protein catalog) and 292 million sequences from 775 marine eukaryotic metatranscriptomes (marine eukaryotic reference catalog), the largest free collections of protein sequences. The protein-level assembler can assemble protein catalogs from raw metagenomic sequencing data, enabling large-scale metagenomics studies.
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- Authors
- Steinegger, M., Mirdita, M., & Söding, J.
- Affiliations
- Seoul National University (KR)
- Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry (DE)
- Corresponding author
- Steinegger, Martin
- Söding, Johannes
- Venue
- Nature Methods
- Published
- 2019-06-24
- Volume
- 16
- Issue
- 7
- Pages
- 603-606
- ISSN
- 1548-7091 (ISSN-L)
- 1548-7105
- OpenAlex
- W2949342052
- Cited by
- 445
- References
- 31
- Citations by year
- 2026: 38 · 2025: 78 · 2024: 101 · 2023: 78 · 2022: 71 · 2021: 50 · 2020: 23 · 2019: 6
- FWCI
- 12.42
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Locations
- Nature Methods (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (acceptedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) (submittedVersion)
- Seoul National University Open Repository (Seoul National University) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Materials and Energy Research Center
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecology › Environmental DNA in Biodiversity Studies
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecology › Microbial Community Ecology and Physiology
- Keywords
- metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, soil metagenome
- MeSH terms
- Amino Acid Sequence, Codon, Proteins, Open Reading Frames, Metagenomics
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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