MetaEuk

MetaEuk identifies and annotates protein-coding genes in eukaryotic metagenomic contigs to enable high-sensitivity discovery of divergent proteins from unicellular eukaryotes.

Key Features:

• Reference-Based Discovery: MetaEuk uses reference-based methodologies to identify protein-coding genes within eukaryotic metagenomic contigs, enabling detection of genes with low sequence similarity to known references.
• High Sensitivity: Benchmarking on seven diverse annotated genomes demonstrates high sensitivity for identifying highly divergent proteins.
• Efficient Processing: Performs rapid searches on 6-frame-translated contig fragments and optimally combines matches into multi-exon protein predictions.
• Scalability and Performance: Applied to the Tara Oceans dataset, it predicted over 12 million protein-coding genes from 912 samples in eight days using ten 16-core servers.

Scientific Applications:

• Ecological Research: Uncovers roles of unicellular eukaryotes as predators, decomposers, phototrophs, and symbionts to inform microbial community dynamics.
• Biotechnology and Human Health: Enables discovery of novel proteins that can inform biotechnological applications and human health–related processes.
• Evolutionary Studies: Identifies genes from sparsely sampled eukaryotic supergroups to support evolutionary biology research.

Methodology:

Performs 6-frame translation of contig fragments, conducts reference-based searches on translated fragments, and optimally integrates matches to assemble multi-exon protein predictions.