Taxonomic Assignment of Metagenomic Sequencing Reads

• Activity Number: 224
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, July 30, 2012 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Computing
• Author(s): Hongmei Jiang*+ and Lingling An
• Companies: Northwestern University and University of Arizona
• Keywords: Metagenomics ; Next-generation sequencing ; Taxonomy

Abstract

Next-generation sequencing technologies greatly promote the field of metagenomics which studies multiple genomes recovered directly from an environment without culturing them. Here, we propose a mixture model to assign sequencing reads to the taxonomy and estimate the relative abundance of multiple genomes present in a metagenomic sample, by utilizing both sequence alignment scores and relative abundance of genomes. The method is comprehensively tested on simulated metagenomic data and is able to accurately estimate the relative abundance of the genomes. The current statistical and computational methods that are being developed to analyze the metagnoimcs data and the challenges will be highlighted in the talk.